Art Lately

Here are some of my recent artworks for class. Today I found out I am so far getting a B+, which will be higher when I submit a few sketchbook exercises I missed. (There is no penalty for late work, and ugh, my copy of the book never arrived so I have to use the library copy, which I do like doing, but it requires planning and I messed up one day.) Then it will either go up or down based on whether my final project is higher quality or lower than the rest of my assignments. Also, we can do revisions to the assignments when we turn them in for the final portfolio. I plan to revise my enlargement drawing, and other than that I have revised 2 of mine- one the landscape pen and ink revision, and one that I ruined the white pigment by spraying it with fixative (which is only for black and grey media, it turns out).
I forget if I posted this. It is a bosch giraffe being investigated by bosch swine. It is on a background made of a cannibalized children's book. I tested my charcoal on one of the pages and it marked it, but after i assembled the collage i tried to sketch in charcoal, then in sepia stick, then in compressed charcoal, then in charcoal pencil, and it did not work at all. I could get the conte to show up but i only have colors, so i did red. That is why it did not show up very well.
This one is a surreal/distorted exterior. We could either use proportion perfectly, or do it entirely, entirely wrong. If you do little tweaks it will look accidental. That is really how the building looks, with the center bridge that looks essentially like in the picture. It is this crazy cement building that is like a fortress, with walls that slope back, and a funny little second story bridge entrance. (the other sides all have big proper entrances.) The bridge in the foreground is a distorted Oakes bridge, but IRL there is a bridge located in the area that is the background of this drawing. But, I do not know what it looks like, even though I walked all around it, because there are a lot of trees in the way. Here is a photo of a different side of the building. My batteries died before I took a picture of the view I drew.
Oh, figure drawing is weird. We have to look at someone naked, which normally I never do. I sometimes see people who are naked, and it is fine, but I do not look really hard at them and depict their curves calligraphically in 30 second studies, because that is not Gym Etiquette.
These are all of the same girl. But, okay, it is my least favorite medium, and I only got 30 seconds, and it is less than that really because it includes the time the model takes getting into the next pose, which is easily 3 seconds. When we walked around to see everyone's work, some of them were just awesome. How can people do that? Just: swish, tada! Our professor kept telling us economy of line. I think if I had greater control over the thickness of the line while using a calligraphy brush it would be better. I wonder if other people are using higher end brushes? I have one that cost around $3 but the shop had some for $24.
Then we ended with a 45 minute extended pose. (The model got a break. what a difficult job. I can barely hold still at all. She got right back into it perfectly as well, except some people thought she did not. Maybe her face moved? We all sketched in a circle and I drew her back, so that would not affect mine) It's amazing to me that I did these 2 pages in the same session. (The second one had to be a blend of charcoal and ink.) There's something a little too bendy about her right thigh, and I would have made her hand regular size except that ink is rather final, but this still actually looks like a human person.

Next up? Self portraits. Face, 3/4 face, and head/shoulders (extended tonal). I am really excited about my Face Contour one, it is an extreme close up of one eye. It is forbidden to work from photos but it was neccessary. I was really straining my eyes trying to make them open really far and also peer at something to one side (bc in the draft where i was staring at something right in front of my eye it looked very weird, like i was going to get a beetle on a pin stabbed into my eye. So I offset it, am looking sideways, and I switched the beetle for a sheep. And instead of on a pin it is in tweezers.*) I just took the picture and roughed the lines and then used peering at the mirror to get the details. My 3/4 face is so bad. I do not know how to look at the mirror and also have my head turned and also draw. But I showed the prof and told her I was thinking of scrapping it, and she told me to repair the nose and move the mouth up and it would look fine.

*Oh man. It is artisty to be edgy, yeah? But I can't do it. I initially was playing with the eye being close up because it is peering into a water cup with the other eye floating in, like dentures, but 1. that was not exactly the topic 2. that is so gross. So I did a thumbnail sketch of it with the eyeball replaced with a seahorse, and then both eyes replaced with seahorses, and then I replaced the water cup with an aquarium, and then I put the eyes back but made the one in the tank a spiny finned eye, and then I put it in the "does not respond to the prompt" file in my brain and let it go. Hm. Now I am moving it to the futuristic movie scene. How neat, a little bedside aquarium of brown, blue, violet eyes, swimming around lazily until the actor stirs, when they all vie for position at the top, and the actor sits up in bed, rubs her eye sockets, adds fresh saline solution to the tank, and plucks out some little gray eyes and puts them in. I have to write that down. (.... when I really want to remember something I write it on a piece of furniture. The blog just does not work like that.) I think I can do a version with translucent polymer clay and an aquarium with a filter. I am really, really taken with this.