Drawing II

It's strange to think that I took Drawing II a full year ago now. Stranger even that I never photographed my work to share on this blog! As of right now, this class is among the top three classes that I've taken at college. The semester was full of experimentation and just pure fun.

I got to draw, for school, for over six hours each week. And, unlike my Drawing I class, I got to choose a lot of the subject matter and style for the projects!

(I've shared artwork from my Drawing I and 2D Design classes in the past, and will continue to post class work on my blog-- you can easily access those posts here).

Below are just a few of the more finished pieces that I made in the class!

The funny thing about this piece is that it isn't a drawing at all-- it's a painting! I was so excited that my projects no longer had to be charcoal still life drawings.

My professor was an older guy who spoke very, very quietly but was always chock full of helpful advice and artists to study. 

He also had a great sense of just-go-for-it which I appreciated a lot. It's the style of learning that I was accustomed to from homeschooling and teaching myself art. If you don't think something is impossible, you won't be scared away from trying to succeed at it!

This project was supposed to challenge us in handling color. I painted these flowers in india ink without an underdrawing. Then, I reversed the way I would normally handle color-- and colored in the background with watercolors!

Um... so we also had to draw a skull and glue it on a photocopy of an earlier piece of art. Cue flowers with random skull on it. However, I did have fun with doing reversed colors on the skull.

I was really proud of this one. :)

(Even though when I displayed it for a Portfolio Workshop this semester, two different professors dismissed it as "kitchy" and "too cute" and "ridiculous with all those cartoony trees." The professors in the design department can be so much more opinionated and caustic than those in the art department.)

This is a large colored pencil drawing inspired by photos I took of Pike's Peak. It's a gift for my parents; I took the photographs on a family vacation a few years ago.

Every time I see this piece, I don't think about our Colorado vacation-- I think about Genghis Khan!

We were allowed to listen to our headphones during class. Whenever I am brainstorming or sketching, I like to listen to chill instrumental music. When it comes down to the hard work of doing repetitive details like 2,000 tiny trees, though, I become intellectually bored.

This is why audiobooks and podcasts are so great. I listened to the entire Hardcore History podcast about Genghis Khan while making this piece!

I know I've mentioned it once before on my blog, but my new habit of listening to audiobooks has done wonders for my listening comprehension. I'm slightly hard of hearing (that, or I have a difficult time processing audio), and over the past two years I've gotten much better at being able to focus on things I'm listening to. 

This is a two-and-a-half hour study of our little student lounge done in ballpoint pens.

Have mercy on the terribly squished perspective on the chairs. There is no excuse. It's just... there. Drawing from life is hard, my friends.

GUYS I DREW THIS WITH SILVER!

I'm not kidding. This is not done with pencil at all.

I prepped a piece of matboard with rough white wall paint. Then, I bought a small piece of pure silver and inserted it into the body of a ballpoint pen.

The silver scratched the rough painted surface, leaving very light and fine marks behind. After two months, the silver drawing had oxidized to the dark color you see here.

The process is called silverpoint, and it's just one of the many unique techniques that my professor showed us! Artists like Michelangelo used to use silverpoint for sketches, because it was cheaper than pencil lead and less messy than charcoal.

I literally drew Bag End in silver!

This is one of my new favorite techniques, and I'm excited for the chance to do some more illustrations in this style.

It's ridiculously hard to draw babies, especially your very, very little sister whose face looked different in every picture you took. The drawing of "Rose" on the right is much better. 

I still have mixed feelings about this piece, but I was grateful for the chance to work with pencil again. I hadn't had the time to work on a large pencil piece since I had made the From the Dragon Hoard drawing in my junior year of highschool. This drawing is nowhere near that quality, simply because I didn't put twenty-plus hours into it!

Hogwarts! In crazy colors!

Ink line drawings and wild watercolors are my new favorite techniques. I took this class a year ago; since then, this style has been my go-to.

The entire thing was drawn with a real quill pen that my professor made himself!

This is a sample piece from the Day of Drawing Wrinkles in Cloth.

The Disney artist Kent Melton had an exhibit at our university for two weeks. We spent two class periods sitting on the floor of the exhibition room with our sketchbooks. I filled my sketchbook with freehand copies of Kent Melton's beautiful animation sketches.

My roommate snagged this picture of me sitting on the dorm floor drawing. She has so much patience to deal with my crazy art student antics!

I forgot to take a picture of this picture when it was finished. I had completed all of the projects for Drawing II early, and spent the last week of class drawing my friend and her fiance. The final drawing had their name and wedding date calligraphied on it.

______

Now, I just need to write up a post about my amazing Metals I class, and then I'll be done with updates about my freshman art classes. The ironic thing is that I am writing this just a couple weeks before I complete my sophmore year of college. 

When I am caught up in projects that take hours and hours of my time, I easily get lost in the small emotions that come with pouring so much energy into the pieces. A year after making these drawings, I have a much better perspective. This is both the blessing and the curse of being an artist; I am always looking for ways to improve, but I am also my own worst critic!

Freshman Year -- 2D Design Art Dump!

Hey everyone! I have so much artwork from my freshman year that I'm going to have to break it up into a couple of posts. I'm pursuing a Graphic Design and Illustration major (it's a tough program to get in to and I won't know if I do until next spring) and freshman year was dedicated to the Foundations. These are the basic art classes that everyone in the art department has to take.

First semester I took 2D Design and Drawing I.

My 2D Design course was interesting... We had a textbook to learn the basics of art theory. I had honestly expected to learn more from it, considering that the only art class I had in the past was an informal one at the house of an artist who lives a few neighborhoods away. Being a bookworm pays off, though! 

The textbook and lectures fairly well bored me to death, and I'm far too critical of the way that art classes handle critiques. Critiques were three hour long ordeals in which we over-analyzed the movement, balance, repetition, etc, of abstract pieces of art. There was one kid who insisted that every single piece was somehow an abstract rendition of a city, another who said "it's crap" quite a lot, and another who was so nice to everyone that her critiques were more acclamation than critique. To be fair, I did learn a lot about ways of analyzing art and how to describe things that just look "off." 

However, I did come up with some pieces I was pretty excited about, and the professor was nice.

It might not look like much, but this drawing was really fun to do. It was one of those zen pieces, if you know what I mean. We had to incorporate patterns around random pieces of construction paper that we cut out. I love pen-work so spending hours doodling in class wasn't really a chore.

There is one thing I have to say about art classes-- it's weird to adjust to making art for someone else and oftentimes making things I really don't care about, yet still putting in all my best effort, work, and creativity.

Thankfully I've had some experience with that during these years of running my Shoppe (minus the "don't care about it" part because I always seem to care about jewelry-making). It's a strange mindset but I'm going to have to get used to it when I go into art and design as a career. There is a HUGE difference between personal art and work art, and I'm learning how to enjoy them both.



By the way, I hate construction paper so much now. We spent the first couple of weeks cutting out random shapes and gluing them in random ways and analyzing them. This is the only remotely interesting piece I made. One of the construction-paper pieces consisted of hand-cutting some perfect squares in three different sizes, and rearranging them until the professor approved it as "aesthetic"-- FOR SIX HOURS.

After this, we got to do some fun work.

One of the many things I've learned about art classes is that you really take out of them what you put in. It's not like math, science, or even (sometimes) the liberal arts, where you gain concrete knowledge as the end goal of the class, and there is a set amount of material to learn.

I've noticed that I get on the nerves of some fellow students because I'm always shooting for the stars, but I do like to challenge myself rather than settling for the bare minimum requirement for our assignments. 2D Design was a very basic course, but I did learn a lot simply from going overkill during the six hours a week I was in class.

The picture above was from an assignment to use perspective points and horizon lines to create a picture that incorporated visual volume. We were also allowed only three colors (of which we could only make tints and shades).

The inspiration came from M.C. Escher's "Polyhedra" (shown at right). Basically I constructed a bunch of basic shapes and had them interlock in visual 3D space. The only thing that I don't like about this piece is that my professor told me that I had to paint each face of the cubes and triangles a solid color-- no shading based on internal shadows. She said this was because it was too advanced for our class and some of the students don't know how to do it without reference photos. "Save it for dedicated painting classes."

I kind of wish that art students were less competitive. I know that competition is a big motivator (for myself included), but there are some people who can't be genuinely happy for another person's talent. I sure know that I have a hard time fighting off jealously for those insanely gifted people in my classes, and I understand the feeling 100%. However, I dislike being apologetic for trying my best at the things I do best.

Anyway-- back to art!

The colors in this photograph came out way too orange but I can't seem to Photoshop it into the real-life colors. (Did I really just verb-ify "Photoshop"?).

This was a technique in color-mixing. The piece had to incorporate transparent objects, but every change in color due to overlapping objects had to be done by MIXING the paint colors-- no easy-peasey washes. It took forever. 

I couldn't come up with what design to do (abstract work requires too much thinking, darn it!), so I decided to paint a song instead. I don't think I've talked about it much on this blog, but I've recently discovered that I am not crazy. (Surprise! lol!). Ever since I can remember, I've associated colors and shapes (and sometimes textures and personalities) with different things like music, letters, and numbers. It's an actual psychological phenomenon called synesthesia.

Anyway, that is just proof that I am not crazy when I said I wanted to paint a song. I picked a cool one by Mannheim Steamroller-- below is the YouTube video. I painted snippets from the first thirty seconds or so.

(The full Fresh Aire song collection is on youtube here).

I wonder if any of you can listen to the song and see it in the painting, too? The painting is pretty meaningful to me because it's one of the ways I remember the song, but I imagine it's just a normal abstract piece to literally everyone else.

In this painting, we had to start with cutting out a small piece of a design from anything and build an entire painting off of that one little cut out, perfectly matching the colors. If you look closely at the the painting, you can see a small shiny circle smack in the middle of the red and blue in the middle. That's a cut out from a tea container.

Anyway, the design I came up with is kinda-sorta based off of Dancheong (a Korean art form I've blogged about before). Only it morphed into something else altogether.

That's all the interesting work from my 2D design class! Later this week I'll share artwork from my Drawing I class.

____________________

P.S. I have another flash sale going on on my Shoppe right now-- I'm moving everything from Artfire to Etsy, and I'd like to clear out some of my inventory while I make that switch!

This Woodland Elf Jewelry Set is 50% off right now.

(Note-- this one just sold as I was working on this post. I'm going to keep it in the post, though, because I like Frozen. :) It's a great movie!)

Want to stay in the loop and know every time I have a sale? Follow my Facebook page or Tumblr or Twitter!