Another semester wrapping up...


My Life Drawing class is coming to an end tomorrow... sadness... it was fun.

Here's a few more class projects that I may or may not have shown on the blog (but I'm not about to go digging through posts to see what I have). I'm not about to show ALL the things I made... I tend to pick my art apart, there's always something I don't like about a picture, I guess when you make it yourself you're never quite happy with it. At least I'm not. It's like when I start a piece I expect it to be some fantastic work worthy of hanging in the Guggenheim... but then somewhere along the way I find a glitch I don't like and just want to scrap the whole thing. Anyway, here's a few I don't mind showing y'all.

This was another quick "gesture" drawing, but I like the lines and the pose in this one. I tried using curving, swirly lines to emphasize roundness in her female form. Oh, and the medium is charcoal.

Our instructor had us experimenting with Abstract art. I can't do abstract. Seriously. It's like asking Bob Dole to be a comedian. It just ain't gonna happen. Different minds see things differently, thus why you have Cubism and Impressionism and Minimalism and so forth, it's how that artist sees an image and how they choose to portray it for the rest of the world to understand their viewpoint. I'm a Realist... period. So I really struggled with the abstract stuff. This next one is the closest I could come to it. First let me explain the setup- our model was standing pointing at a pile of disassembled manequin parts. I took one look and thought, "What the f--- can I do with THAT mess???" Okay, so it's not wildly abstract, but it is for me... the colors are a lot brighter and bolder than what you see here... but I do like the triangular shape to the whole drawing, other students said it looks like she's a whole person rising up out of a pile of body parts....................... okay, sure....................


For this next piece we were told to mimic an Impressionist artist... so I chose one of my favorites, Edgar Degas. He was known for his drawings of ballerinas, and I like his soft pastel colors outlined by contour lines of black and white. With impressionism you don't really color inside the lines, you put marks of color on the paper and your eye optically blends it. So this was my stab at it...


This last pic is my final project. We had to incorporate both the model and the ladder, and I said screw it I'll put pieces of ladder going all over. They at least give it a balanced look to the whole thing. And an explanation of her expression? Well it's sorta how bored I got drawing the same person over and over and over and over.... she was about to fall asleep. A fitting summation of the end of the semester.

Again it doesn't do it justice here, the colors are much better in real life. Oh, and the last 3 pics were all chalk pastel for the medium. The last one was the largest I've gone so far, it's about 4ft across by 5ft, so she's almost life size but not quite...

We never had a chance to draw a male model. I asked the instructor why, and he said the guy he uses happens to go to school there now, and the guy thought it would 'feel weird' to have other students drawing him nude and then see them in another class, haha. I wonder if he ever had that dream about showing up in class naked...