skeletons

 some skeletons I had to draw for Life Drawing class. :) 

Life Gestures

Life Drawings

Oops. I really mean to update my blog more often with what I've been working on. Always seem to end up posting everything after the semester is over. Probably because I only have my iphone camera while at university and that doesn't exactly deliver the best quality image. So I finally got the chance to take some nice photos now that I'm home on break. Here's a few excerpts from the life drawing class I took this past semester:

↑some studies from our textbook↓

one layer

okay, so maybe two... (Background and girl) The important thing is that I'm trying out some new coloring techniques. :)

Bittersweet

My Disneyland pass expired last Tuesday... So far I'm doing well without it, in all honestly I need a break from the Park. At this point, the thing I miss the most is the opportunity to relax on a bench and sketch landmarks and passersby...

This was drawn Mon 9/24/2012

Life Drawing Week Two and Three

I'm super excited to be in a life drawing class this semester. Because my anatomy is terrible at the moment and I need to get better. I'm going to post a few selections of what we've done so far. I'm not terribly happy with how I've been drawing as of late, but I'm not so sure if I'll ever be satisfied with that. Just gotta keep drawing!

This exercise was just for the professor to see how we drew and what we know. I obviously know nothing. I kind of hate everything about this. Except the skeleton. Skeletons are pretty cool. What is composition though? Obviously I have no idea.

A couple of quick gestures.

I think this was about 20 minutes? I'm super rusty at life drawing so I didn't even finish. Oops. That day I was kind of going nuts with different media though, experimenting and such. So it's no wonder things didn't turn out. My professor liked my bold use of color though, so there's that. 

This past week fared a little better for me with drawing. A couple of quick 1-2 minute gestures. 

Some more. I forget how long these were? 

This might have been four minutes? I took out some white charcoal to give some definition, since I finished a little early...

now we're getting into some gestures for what would eventually become some story sketches.  

for the story sketches we'd have to make the figure a mannikin. and add an environment.

drawing both mannikin and gesture. Trying to understand structure and form.

These are the story sketches. Drawn on tracing paper. We did a few in class.

And the rest we had to do for homework, but I'll spare posting those. It's probably already getting monotonous. 

Life Painting

This past semester I took a life painting class. Now I love life drawing and I love painting... but the two together? I was a little hesitant. I've never been very good at painting the human form, especially when it comes to rendering flesh. The first few weeks were monochromatic paintings mainly of still lifes and mannequins. 

Then we moved onto painting people in black and white so that we could focus on the values that form the body. A little intimidating at first... but not really that much to worry about.

Then came the worrying as we broke out the color paints. Did a lot of experimenting the first few weeks, trying to figure out how color works.

Oh, drapery. The love of every art student. From this moment onward we were told that we'd be moving away from painting just nudes. And sure enough, as the weeks progressed the models started getting more and more clothed. 

^This model was super cool. She brought a ton of props and she had playlists of themed music for us to paint to. She played a bunch of spy themes and such while we were painting the second one. Really helped to immerse us all in the storytelling. At least I think so. 

Probably my personal favorite painting from the semester.

For our final painting of the semester we had to create our own background. My background turned out okay, it's definitely one of the things I need to work on over summer. 

Various homework:

We had to recreate a master's work. First in black and white and then again in color. I chose a work by Degas. I really liked the colors in the piece and the pose so I decided to paint it, disregarding the fact that it isn't an oil painting to begin with. I was more focused on the color.

We had an assignment to paint our ears, eyes, nose, and mouth from 3 different angles. I thought just painting them individually would be boring, so I drew three angles of my face and painted only the parts I had to paint. I'm actually surprised I was the only student to do this. 

Kind of creepy if you look at it too long.

Our final homework assignment was to paint a friend in an environment. My sister always is telling me to draw her, and she jumped at the chance to be my model. However once I started painting, she wasn't as enthusiastic. I don't think she'll be modeling for me again anytime soon. We probably should've found an easier pose. Looking at this painting now, I think I went a little crazy with the colors.

And I will end this post with a self portrait: 

THIS IS MY FACE!