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.