Drawing Class - Week 9: Classmates Cartoon #3

more of the same. I didn't finish in time to start adding color (except for that smear of white oil pastel dead center).

no class this week

(Thanksgiving holiday)

His name is JerMajesty

Drawing Class - Week 8: Classmates Cartoon #2

What you are looking at:
same set-up as last week, but facing 2 rows instead of 1.
(we were in 2 joined rows of V's like this, >>>>><<<<< , running east-west across the room, where each 'v' represents 2 students, each seated facing the pointy center.) I'm sitting toward the center of the row, my back to the window, facing NW. The white tape is what we use instead of trying to erase 9B pencil. Lots of white tape this week. The big head centered in the top panel is my immediate neighbor. I'm looking west.
The 4th fellow from the left is the same character who appears as the left-most figure in the second panel. (The purple door dead-center is one of 2 purple wonders in the same classroom. This isn't even NYU!) The yellow rectangles are light-wood supply cabinets and the white and gray vertical stripes in front of them are two sides of a rectangular column. I'm facing north.
For the third panel, I'm looking behind me, toward the eastern wall. The lady on the left is an architect. (The weird shape behind her is the outline of stacked plastic chairs.) The figure next to her is a young Japanese guy here for a year to learn English--he's enrolled full-time at Kaplan?! which apparently offers ESL--and to study art.* Behind him, another white column, with the other purple door to the immediate right. A guy with long hair--I don't know him yet. The girl with glasses from the first day of class. The guy in the stocking cap sitting directly behind me is the blond guy from the far right of last week's picture. He's a working illustrator and this is his second semester. (Several of my classmates are repeat customers.)
Fourth panel: almost the same as the second, obvs, but I'm looking more directly north. I was trying to see what would happen if I chose fewer figures, with more space between them. Turns out it's not good, esp the way i accidentally made space bend back from the giant cowboy hat. The right-most figure is my direct opposite, not the hat guy.

The unfinished painting: I think I like the 3rd panel drawing the best [mostly the hand], but the 2nd panel had a little more variety of shapes and sizes. There was only 1/2 hr left in class when I started adding color, so I started with the things I didn't want to spend too much time on: the cowboy hat, the background and floor, the drawing boards. I finished as much of them as I'd care to. I was just starting on the figures' hair and faces when it was time to clean up. I spent about 5-10 minutes on their skin colors, but not much else. I was hoping to draw their eyes this time! I don't know how to spend 5 minutes and make it look like 25 minutes worth of work. Real artists do it all the time, right? My hunch is that particular skill involves "No More Mistakes."** I was a little disappointed in my time management because I didn't finish the faces, which is the part I like most and that confuses me most. I got a little carried away with making the black blob in the center (stacked plastic chairs, y'all) out of colors other than black.

*He majored in architecture back in Japan. I asked him if he'd study with any architects here--nope. He's here for the English, which he hopes will be useful in his career. I hope English will prove more useful to him than it has for me. I think this might be his first drawing experience. Next year, he's off to Finland, studying "design" for another year. Guts! I like his style of study abroad. It turns out that no one cares if you're earning transferable college credits. He's starting from scratch with the English. (Finnish? Umm, what do you think?)

**which was, yes, my New Year's Resolution for the past 3 yrs running, for those of you keeping track, or who might recognize the phrase. So far, not so good: mistakes at every opportunity. "No More Mistakes" will be every year's NYR from now on or until I'm proficient at my current level of difficulty.

Drawing Class - Week 7: Classmates "comic strip" with eerie hollow socket eyes.

The extremely horizontal format of this last Wednesday's drawing means that I don't have time to scan it in this afternoon and do the Photoshop merging. I'll probably scan it eventually because it's almost pointless to post oil pastel paintings you can't 'click' on to see the strokes close-up, and my digital camera can't capture that degree of detail. And it distorts the straight edges. Also, the scanner gives a more honest representation of the colors. For now, here's a photo for this week. (for all 4? 5? of you kind friends tracking my progress.)

These are a few of my classmates. We are seated in parallel rows, facing each other, drawing each other, and trying to be good models for each other by not moving too too much.

1. We were supposed to fold our paper into four horizontal sections and, in the first section, make an interesting composition with the figures' shapes, perhaps playing off their change in size as they get closer.

2. Second section: vary the composition, perhaps by radically changing the scale of the heads. The three figures here are the 3 left-most figures from the panel above.

3. Third section: make a third completely different composition, and, instead changing the scale again, perhaps by using the negative space in a different way, or perhaps some "other" way. (yeah, me neither.) I was mostly finished with this panel before I realized that all 3 of my panels were pretty much identical. Dang! I'd tried to start them out so differently on the left-hand side of the page, but by the time I got to the right side, I was back drawing the same thing.

4. Fourth section: I didn't know how to make a radically different or even mostly different composition, so I dropped my gaze a little and drew their torsos/drawing boards. Now I realize I should've looked lower and drawn their shoes, which would've been more interesting than a finished row of squarish boards.

5. Color: pick one section and add color to the entire section (not just a cropped section of it or partial color).

So--I think 'composition' was the object of the lesson, or composition-by-cropping. I'm still feeling really weak at composition, so way far lost that I don't really understand why I don't understand it.

One tiny comment my teacher made did help me a lot. I couldn't figure out which panel to choose for color and I was leaning toward the bottom one or the second one, but I didn't think the choice of any of these four made a difference one way or another. He said, "well, yes, it does. Your bottom panel would have too much brown wood, and the second panel would have too much of the same flesh color." So obvious, but in that moment, the coin finally dropped. It's like arranging colored shapes!

It was a long and frustrating night, but I had a Diet Coke to see me through the struggle and so by the end of the class, I was enjoying myself. I kind of like this one! The likenesses are pretty good and I'm feeling a lot more confident layering the oil pastels. Not confident enough to attempt drawing the lines for their eyes because I couldn't even make the pastels give me lines in the right places for their mouths, but just before I left class, I was starting to feel happy about the wall to the left of the purple door and about that center closet door because they turned out close to the colors I was trying to make. Progress! Also, it's easier/more fun to coax out their likenesses in the pastels than in pencil--I don't have to worry so much about mistakes or getting it wrong the first few times and making a mess with the eraser because I can keep layering and adjusting. Also, since you're working with color on the whole entire face instead of inventing arbitrary lines to represent the facial features, it's so much easier to tell if it looks like the person or not.

I like adding color more than drawing lines.

On separate occasions, I showed this drawing to Liesel and to my brother Rob, and they both said, with almost the same words and exactly the same happy intonation, "hey! you're drawing cartoons! a comic strip!" And both times, I was like, "no--cartoons? comics? what are you even talking about?" I see it, okay, I see it.

Drawing New York - Rockefeller Ctr, lower level (still impossible)

First, some junky photos of the night from my crummy camera-phone. You're welcome!

* * *

Bonus Monday night class again. We met at the GE Bldg and went to the courtyard below where you can watch the ice skating from inside, behind glass doors. I'd never been there. It was pleasant and warm. The tree wasn't up yet and the crowds weren't overwhelming.

We were supposed to draw out our panels and add oil pastel to one of the four. I ran out of time, natch, so there's no color. Too busy going hog wild on all those little windows, I guess. I have a difficult time deciding which details to leave out. This surprises none of you who know me at all. It surprises me every time! It's hard for me to simplify a big picture without stripping the heart away. It's a lot easier for me, a beginner, to approximate a scene with masses of overlapping information and hope that some of it turns out right than to isolate and then precisely delineate the few perfect, elegant shapes capable of representing the same thing.

When my teacher came by, he cried, "Good Lord--the data in that thing!" I had been thinking the same thing, but about the world. I'm not used to paying so much attention with my eyes.

Enjoy the wonky 'straight' lines. Charming, aren't they? Every single one goes off track even more perfectly than if I'd planned it.
It's like having a student driver for a right hand.

Long, long ago I had some children's books with wobbly ink illustrations very similar to these--I think a few were set in New York!--and I remember thinking, "why do adults always think kids like messy drawings just because we [kids] can't draw very well yet?" I don't know why I imagined that adults were conspiring to deprive young readers. The pictures were probably great. I remember that the back pages and dust jackets proudly declared the inclusion of original work by artists who were "award winning" (imagine my total disgust).

I'm supposed to be concentrating here on representing the figures as shapes with stylized straight or round lines--no fluid, curvy stuff. I'm trying to do that here but it's a lot harder for me to stylize than to copy what my eyes are telling me and I forgot sometimes to STOP trying to make the pictures look like the real people and to just draw shapes without worrying if they're accurate. The top panel, my first of the night, is my favorite because the people were far enough away that it was easy to turn them into little shapes.

The top panel is looking up to street level, from the rink facing 5th Ave.
The second panel is the ice rink, looking east, below street level.
The third panel looks south toward the cafe tables around me.
The fourth panel looks southwest, same tables. The girl to the far right of the third panel is the same girl centered in the fourth.

I like to draw the other art students because I imagine they're less frightened by my drawing board and my unblinking, unwavering stare.