Week Nine

This was our first life drawing lesson. We looked at movement in the anatomy and basic human form. We started off by doing quick one minute sketches:

These are my first life drawing sketches. The top left and bottom right do not have the correct proportions or shapes and did not go according to plan. The top right has good movement flowing through the head and arch of the back, but the rest of the sketch is rushed. The bottom left is the most successful as you can clearly see what position the model was stood in, even how far her head was tilt back and captures good movement.

These are my skeletal drawings. I used rough lines to mark where the bones were (the arms, legs and spine) and then used the lines to help me to get a more accurate body form. I feel as though the skeletal drawings improved my positioning of lines and helped me to get good movement throughout each sketch.

This is my final drawing of the session. I tried to get my lines to flow more instead of having 'scratchy' little lines. I measured the proportions of the body and did my best to put them onto paper. I feel that this drawing went well as it has a nice composition. If I had more time I would have liked to add some shading to make it more 3 dimensional. I had a lot of difficulty with getting the stretched out leg correct. I had to keep redoing the length of it, and although it is not perfect I think that it works still. I really like the flow of the cloth and the face and hair. This picture took me 15 minutes and I used a 2B pencil.

Week Eight

This week we were focussing on reflective surfaces, the way light hits and travels through an object, making the object look different than it's usual state. I focussed on looking at the specular reflections and the diffused reflections. We started off with quick 5 minute sketches, making sure that there were no kissing objects, and no item was isolated.

First 5 minute sketch:

Second 5 minute sketch:

After my first sketch I realised I had drawn too big as not everything would fit on the page, so for my second I reduced the size. I don't feel that either of these sketches went well, although the objects are in the right proportions to each other, with some accurate lines. I need to stop including detail in my plans, until I have all the objects down and in the right position.

This was my final piece. I have shown refractions in the glass jars and ball, and reflections in the copper objects. The refractions have made the water in the jars change direction to what would normally be seen. For the reflections I used different gradients of grey to show where the reflections of other objects are and also where the light bounces off them. I have left no object orphaned, as all the objects are either 'attached' to another or the big table cloth. There are also no kissing objects. I spent 10 minutes on the composition and 30 on finishing off. I used a 3B pencil for this drawing.

Week Seven

 This week was all about texture. My first sketch is of an apple and orange. I chose to drew them one behind the other to give it a good composition. I gave the orange a darker skin tone than the apple, and shaded it in a different pencil movement to create contrast. On the orange I also added dimples to show the texture. On the apple I added in darker patches to show the impurities of the object. I made the apple look more smoother than the orange as it would be in reality. This drawing took 27 minutes and I used a 3B pencil.

This sketch is of a wicker basket with a metal can on top. I used harder straighter lines to create the can combined with straight solid cross hatching for the reflections to give a more metallic feel than the basket. On the basket I used a mixture of hard and soft lines, the harder lines were to represent the thicker bits of wicker. I also used cross hatching to show the very small and thin wicker material that makes up the basket. I feel that this picture shows good composition and is interesting to look at. This sketch took 33 minutes and was drawn with a 2B pencil.

This sketch is of a hand holding a bar of wood. I showed the texture on the wood by adding in the little details of the grains and using harder lines and deeper shading in contrast to the skin on the hand where I used very soft shading to represent the delicate nature of skin and also added in a few skin fold lines to add to the texture. I feel that I could have added more to the hand to contrast it even more with the wood. This sketch took 26 minutes and was drawn with a 2B pencil.

Week Six

This week was all about still life. Our main focus was an arrangement of flowers sat on a table with two directional lights shining onto it. We started off with two 1 minute sketches which then progressed onto a longer 3 minute one:

The main purpose of doing these quick sketches was to try and speed up our drawings. They were plans before the final sketch. I feel that I still need to improve on this method, I tend to rush my sketches and not concentrate enough on proportions or the placement of objects. After the 3 minute sketch we did a 5 minute one which we then used as the plan for the main drawing:

I already had a 5 minute plan down, so I corrected the plan and went over it to make it look how I wanted it to, then I could move onto adding details and shading to create a 3 dimensional drawing. I am very pleased with how this turned out, I feel that I have really improved on my shading, I have managed to make the vase look round and the table cloth look folded. If I did this again, I would have worked more on the flowers, defining the petals and the stems more. I added in a background in the last few minutes of this sketch to make the object belong, not just floating in white space. I don't feel as if I got the table top right, it's not the right shape because I was at a difficult angle and couldn't master it. I concentrated a lot on how light hits a surface this week, and tried to get the feel of light bouncing into my picture, especially on the vase and table.

Week Five

This week I went out into the city of Bradford and did sketches of landscapes. I focussed on different perspectives, compositions and shading, as I wanted to bring all the skills I had learnt during the previous weeks together. These are a selection of my best sketches:

This picture is of a factory on the street, I like this because it looks as if the street goes on towards my horizon line towards it's vanishing point. I feel this helps it to have a good composition, as well as how the tallest part of the picture is towards the right hand side rather than being situated in the middle. The quality of the lines could have been improved if I spent more time over them. I used a 2B pencil for this sketch and it took me 15 minutes to complete.

This sketch is of a church drawn from a distance with a garden in the foreground. The composition for this picture went well as the eye follows the wall down the road then stops at the main feature, instead of the eye just concentrating on the church. I feel this effectively uses the rule of thirds. For the bushes behind the fence I used a simple swirl effect to give the impression of the leaves, without actually having to individually draw each leaf.

This picture was drawn at Whitby. This day was really bright and sunny, creating massive shadows from all the gravestones. This uses 2 point perspective and the vanishing points can clearly be identified. Overall, I like this drawing because I have combined lots of different new techniques and created something that has good composition and has different shades to it, representing the light and dark areas. I used a 2B pencil for this drawing and it took me around 40 minutes to complete.