Art: Seabrite Cell Drawing

So for our weekly hw in art class, we had to go to a site, and really, really experience it, and then convey those experiences realistically and in other drawings experimentally and experientially. I picked the beach. Of course. Now that I have a car I go to the beach about twice a day, except on days that I have school. Sometimes if I am much to busy even for a short beach walk, I take the long way home from the grocery store and just drive past it with the windows down, singing really loudly.


This one wasn't to hand in since we are sort of forbidden to work from photographs. I don't really know why I did it, except that I wanted to practice the concrete structures and I was too bored to do one that didn't have a figure.

Here is my shadow on the sand, and my friend's shadow. He is juggling behind his back. I can tell I did not really convey that, but I have no idea how I could have.


This picture was ridiculously difficult. This is my second attempt, which I was working on right up until class started, and which needs to be blended and refined a lot more. I was hesitant in doing that because I don't want to lose distinction. I don't know how to fix it. I can fix up the foreground jacks but the ones covered in seaweed, and farther away? I defined them a little with charcoal pencil, but it is still very unfinished.
This is what I was drawing, in case you are not familiar with seaweed encrusted, seawater eroded gigantic concrete jacks, as in fact many people are not. The ones in my drawing are on fire because one of the "cells" was supposed to be inspired by my mentor, Hieronymus Bosch. Also because I could not at all remotely do the waves in charcoal without them just looking really overworked.
This is my sketchbook rough draft of a wave crashing on the rocks. I am aware that it does not look like that, because my professor asked me what creek it is, so I think it must look like a waterfall, rather than a watercrashup. She suggested I look at Japanese ink drawings of waves. I was too embarrassed to say that I was trying to emulate them by vague, distant memory. When I looked them up, I didn't really like them. That is not how whitewater looks to me.


So this is what I ended up with. I like it, actually, I think I captured the flowing pools of water and the cliff fairly well. The foreground is not sand at ground level, though. It is the edge of the cliff I am sitting on.
I love this item very much. I thought my sketch was decent, but my prof thought the darks were not dark enough, which I think is fair, although I was secretly pleased with the sort of narrative/adventury quality I managed to convey.
I used woodless pencil, which is like a pencil made of only graphite, with a thin plastic shell bonded on. It means you have a really expressive, but still precise, pencil. It is my favorite drawing tool, but unfortunately I can't use it for most of the projects because it doesn't stand up to the scale required (usually 18x24, although for the cell project we just did 5-9 drawings totalling 2 18x 24 pages)

Hm, I remember last year when I went to the beach in order to draw, and I had brought only a pencil, and when I sat down to draw the water I realized my drawing would consist only of plain horizontal lines and I went swimming instead, resolving to return another day with colored pencils. But now, now I would not even need a pencil, I can use bits of charred driftwood.