Drawing – Week 3

This was one of those days…I was tired after work, I didn’t feel like going to class, but I went anyway – the prospect of working with ink was quite exciting. The teacher brought some “toys” to class – for example, some brushes made by her out of bamboo skewers and pieces of thick wiry string, and bits of wooden clothes pegs. Basically we dipped whatever we could find in ink and let loose. Got some fun stuff done:

Some details:

This last one was done by rubbing a piece of wax on the paper first (roughly in the shape of a spiderweb), then by inking the area using diluted black ink:

Then we drew a goat skull that was brought in by the teacher. I used a few different methods:

My favourite one is this one:

Details:

I was pretty tired by this point, and so I was not overly keen when asked to draw a horse (we were copying a drawing by Toulouse Lautrec, but changing the composition). I won’t even link it, it was really appalling…what can I say, I don’t find horses that interesting to draw, so I’ve never tried!

Here’s a couple of ink details with tweaked colours instead, since the colours of the photos in this post are all over the place anyway (I used different cameras and light sources):

Next time – portraits!

Painting – Week 3

This week’s painting class was quite fun. We are now working with acrylics, and I love using my Jo Sonja collection every chance I get! We had to paint a still life again – the wooden vase/bottle thing, a different mask, a fruit basket and a sun hat at the back, spread on a purple cloth:

Not that inspiring a subject (to me), but it was made interesting by the use of impasto (gel medium). I’d never used this before. It’s like a very thick, white, sticky paste that can be diluted or mixed with paint, or used as it is and then painted over. Basically it provides texture, and brings 3D effects to an otherwise flat medium. When mixed with a colour, it makes the colour look as though it’s mixed with white (unsurprisingly…).

I worked with it using the brushes as well as a palette knife. I’m sure you can get really interesting effects by using other tools – things like chicken wire, for example. It’d also be interesting to see if you could embed things into it (beads, glass eyes, etc).

Here is my WIP:

We’re allocating a couple of weeks to this. Next week I’m going to add more detail to this canvas, like shading and extra bits of colour.

We’re also supposed to start thinking about our “major work” – what we’ll be working on for the rest of the term. I can’t decide between a more abstract charcoal piece (or a series of them), a watercolour cityscape (I was thinking of painting a wet road – this would have ample opportunity for bleeds), or something precise and minute in acrylic. Hmmm.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

Hokay. So. When I was a young and naive teenager, I graduated from the Goosebumps series to Fear Street. A natural transition for someone who was used to devouring these books like Halloween candy corn. Later on I moved on to Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, assorted folk ghost stories, books on anecdotal evidence on vampires and werewolves, and so on, not to mention bad, bad horror movies – Stephen King adaptations, teenage series a la Urban Legend and Scream, video game adaptations, etc. Needless to say, I am an absolute sucker for horror, both good and bad. Horror has its own tropes, which can be both unsettling (given the context) and reassuring, or even comforting (because they’re always there). A while ago, on a flight to Europe, I started writing an essay on horror tropes. Perhaps one day I will finish it, or at least, you know, use it to actually write some horror fiction.

However, this post is not concerned with academic musings on the horror genre, or even with my own attempts at writing horror.

I used to work in a hospital. Every month there would be a second hand book sale in the hospital to collect money for various medical charities. I always used to pick up five or more books at each sale (quick note: I love books. I collect books. I hope to one day own a little bookshop. I especially love second hand books – the colour of the paper, the old editions, the smell, the pencilled-in ex-owners’ names on the title page, etc.) At one of the last sales I attended, I managed to secure two Fear Street books. Like a lot of my loot, these were stuck on one on my many bookshelves, and promptly forgotten about.

Until about a week ago.

I picked one at random and read it on the train on my way to work. It was…so, so bad. Words almost fail me. The atrocious attempt at a historical setting (American Civil War period), the stereotypical beautiful (but stupid) sister and the ugly (but smart) sister, the dark mansion with grim, creepy servants, the unrealistic, improbable, tacked-on violence, the Gasp! moment in every second line of dialogue…If I was trying to find the worst teen horror book ever written I think this would be a serious contender.

Without further ado, I give you…Forbidden Secrets:

Look at it. Really. Look at it. It’s…it’s all there. The beautiful, vapid, innocent and troubled-looking Southern Belle; the dark forest about to engulf her; the huge, bleeding black rose; the broken doll with creepy dead eyes that look right through you. This cover is an absolute masterpiece, and completely encapsulates the very essence of the book.

Next in line – The Boy Next Door:

The creepy stalker dude, the (again: beautiful, unsuspecting) girl, the tagline (“They were flirting – with death”) all seem very promising. I hope the dude turns out to be be some sort of undead rotting zombie from Mars. Gasp!

Stay tuned!

(For Goosebumps covers, visit Gamebooks. Did I mention I also used to be a huge collector of Garbage Pail Kids cards? For a full picture collection, visit the Garbage Pail Kids Archive.)

Pimpage

If you like looking at pretty pictures of weird and wonderful art stuff – paintings, sculptures, craft stuff, chainmaille, one-of-a-kind handmade books, etc – check out Ms Nyx’s blog, as it is full of arty eye candy. She also has an Etsy store!

If you like looking at pretty pictures of weird and wonderful art stuff, don’t visit Robot Apple Monkey Blog. Do, however, visit the Robot Apple blog if you like reading about technology, gaming and other assorted and awesome nerdiness!

Drawing – Week 2

I delayed writing this post, maily because it’s not as visually rewarding as some of the others. Last Tuesday’s Drawing class was mostly based on exercises.

First, we drew an irregular shape. Then we had to copy the shape onto a piece of paper of the same size as the original shape:

When that was done, we superimposed the two shapes, to see how well we replicated the original shape:

As you can see, mine’s ok, although far from perfect.

Then we had to draw a hollow tube and shade it in, making it obvious that it’s hollow. I think mine turned out, well, fairly tube-like:

And this is the magnum opus of the evening, which took me maybe an hour to get right:

That’s right, an…egg. Don’t knock it til you try it! It’s way harder than it seems. One of the main problems is that you can’t just draw the egg as you see it (we were each given a real egg to draw). You have to capture the inner egg-ness of the egg; the egg, to be recognisable as an egg, has to be an ideal egg that Plato himself would be proud of. My egg had a groove in the middle, as though the hen had changed her mind about expelling it halfway through the process. Had I drawn this groove, however, the egg would have ceased to be recognisable as an egg, since eggs “don’t have grooves down the middle”. So I downplayed the groove, and focused on the idea of an egg. This, in a way, is the opposite to many of the exercises we’ve been doing, where realism has given way to details and observation – instead, being an exercise in suppressing accurate observation.

The evening ended with a series of sketches of a papier mache duck, in quick succession (~30 seconds per sketch). We were asked to use expressive lines, convey detail but with fewer pencil strokes than that blasted egg, obviously. I really enjoyed this exercise, and my favourite duck is the second one from the left on the middle row (and yes, the model was pretty deformed to begin with):

At first I was unsure of how much I could convey in the time given, so the first few ducks are very basic. As I became used to the short intervals, I began adding more detail.

Next week I think we start on drawing with ink – yay!

Painting – Week 2

Tonight we played around with watercolour. Not my favourite medium, although you can get some really cool effects with it. You can sponge it, bleed it, and even use sandpaper on the finished product, if your paper is sturdy enough. We had to paint a still life scene – thankfully, no fruit or wine bottles:

Here is my watercolour WIP (I am apparently really slow! other people in the class got to do a couple in the time it took me to do this):

I don’t like the top mask. I love masks, but that top one was just too garish and detailed for a watercolour painting. It would probably work better as a detail in an oil painting.

Details:

I added a bit more detail at home:

Details:

I’m really pleased with the feathered mask and the bowling pins. But there’s too much wasted space on my paper, and I don’t think a background would work all that well. I’m going to keep experimenting with watercolour, perhaps I’ll try something a bit more abstract – an abstract cityscape comes to mind. But I really like how well it expresses light/shadow, and I like layering/bleeding it.

Also, because this post is not picture-heavy enough, here are some pics of the College:

Hogwarts gets a Catholic makeover, much?

The photos turned out surprisingly well, considering the camera (my little compact Ixus) and the time of day (night).

Drawing – Week 1

This class was really interesting – I really enjoyed it. The location is less posh, but warmer than where I have Painting (I froze my bits off on Monday! Tomorrow – thick woolen jumper). The class is three times the size, and the instructor is more structured in her approach.

We did an observation exercise – holding out our non-dominant hand, and drawing it without looking at the paper at all – keeping our eyes on the hand, observing its lines and dips and angles and curves.

Here is mine:

The point of this exercise is not to draw a perfect hand – but to learn to observe. The second part was to do the same thing, but with occasional glances at the paper to make sure that the lines more or less connected:

The teacher suggested doing this exercise every day, apparently it really helps develop your hand-eye coordination. I really enjoyed it, as I wasn’t worrying about how good or realistic my drawn hand was – I was drawing what I was seeing, without thinking about what I wanted the finished drawing to look like.

We then mucked around with charcoal:

Then things got a bit psychoanalytic – we had to draw “Anger”, “Joy”, “Anxiety” and “Peacefulness”. I only really like “Anxiety” out of the lot:

Detail:

“Anger” was also ok, but I had trouble with the other two. Maybe I spend more time angry and confused than happy and peaceful – or maybe I’ve just analysed those emotions more…who knows. The teacher tried to draw parallels between our drawings, which I found a bit of a stretch. I think that although we do live in the same context (time and place), those emotions are both quite personal to each of us, and individually influenced by our different backgrounds and experiences. I don’t really believe in universal archetypes – although I do believe in personal symbols, or ones that certain intersecting groups of people share. My impression of how these symbols operate looks like a very complex 3D Venn diagram of different colours and opacities.

That’s it for now – I’m tired and having a bit of Sunday Night Syndrome (or rather, Night Before I Go Back to Work Syndrome).

Painting – Week 1

So, I started art classes this week. Monday is painting, and Tuesday is Drawing.

In Painting we mucked around using pencil, charcoal and and oil pastels. I’m not big on colour theory so I got told off for using purple pastels when I was meant to be using “warm” colours, hehe. Also, we had to base our work on plants and flowers, which I’m not a huge fan of, in general. The one I picked was interesting – some sort of succulent that to me looks like a fungus. I like how it turned out, actually:

Here are some details:

Oil pastel flowers:

“Cool” flower detail:

“Warm” flower detail:

Next week: watercolour! A medium I’ve never been that into, until I went to a cool watercolour exhibition called Moist a few years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art (I think).