Almost taken down by, of all things, a MIRROR!

Oh my, is Lucky going to start posting regularly again? Shh! Don't jinx it.

Today was the final day of class as I have known it for the duration of this semester. Finals are next week and, if all goes as expected, I'll be taking in a 3.75 GPA for the semester. Not bad for my first round of art courses. Yeah, there's a B in there, but it can't be helped. Metalworking ended up being much more difficult than anticipated, and I'm not holding out hope that this last assignment will be enough to pull me up to 90%.

All an all it's been a great semester and I already feel like I've learned so much. Even in drawing, a subject I have been practicing independently since I possessed the fine motor skills to hold a pencil in my hand. So many great tools and techniques have been added to my artistic tool kit.

It seemed fitting that the final project in drawing should be a self portrait. I've spent so much time looking at everything around me and taking in so much outside information that initially the assignment proved to be a struggle. I've never drawn myself from a mirror before and I've never done a large scale portrait in charcoal... Actually, I'm not sure I've ever done a large scale portrait in any medium.

So, after having a minor freak out the first day and leaving class early out of frustration, I took some time to examine what was going wrong. There were a couple major things.

First off, I wasn't using my powdered charcoal which has become my new favorite drawing material. You sprinkle it on the paper and spread it around to give your canvas a nice middle grey. This allows you to add not only shadows with charcoal pencils, but also highlights using an eraser. It also didn't help that the mirror was a bit wonky and squished or stretched my appearance depending on where I was.

The second mental block was a fear that it was too soon to 'immortalized' myself. I was afraid that I would mess it up and forever be ashamed to try again. This is silly, I know, but I'm curious if other artists have had the same problem.

Last Thursday I left early and mulled all these things over in my head. After bolstering my confidence (and practicing drawing myself in the dark), I returned to class on Tuesday to give the self portrait another try. I moved to a darker side of the room because practicing in extremely low light had shown me that if my face were not as well lit, I wasn't as afraid of making the picture too dark too quickly. I also moved to a smaller drawing pad so the task didn't seem so monumental. Once I prepped my paper with powdered charcoal, I dropped all insecurities and began to go to work...

After two full class periods, this is the fruit of my labor:

 

It's not an exact likeness, but then again a reflection can't be. Seriously. I don't have a perfectly symmetrical face or hair line, so any drawing of a reflection is going to be backwards! All technicalities aside, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out... And I'll probably never do it again willingly.

My instructor is actually keeping this one for the foundations show next semester along with the fish painting from last week's post (different class, same instructor). He even went do far as to make sure that I signed up for the Drawing II course that was being taught be the best drawing instructor. It's cool to have teachers looking out for you and I'm mildly curious if my reputation will precede me in that class... Mustn't... Get... Big... HEAD!!

Seriously, though, I have done my best to keep my humility intact. As I said before, even in a subject that ie been practicing since I can remember did I learn something new.

I have got a lot of projects that I have been wanting to work on, so when the break is here, I plan to take a mini-vacation from the Internet... Or at least social networking. After all, I do need to find a job. The idea is to remove as many distractions as possible so that I can use the momentum I have gained this semester to work on things that are for my own enjoyment and not a grade. Either way, I won't be gone for too long. Maybe a week or two at most. I'll be sure to post before I go on break as well.

Speaking of projects done for fun... For anyone who hasn't had a chance to see this yet, this is the finished Thor drawing (WIP was in the last post) for my dear friend Shawnee.

Not bad for ten hours of work... Not bad at all. Until next time!

Two Posts in One Day? What is Going On?!

Very brief post, mainly to show off my first completed design project. The project is known as the 'Black Square Problem' and apparently is a project all design majors will encounter. We were given 6 adjectives and required to create a picture that would convey that adjective or emotion by using only 4 black squares. I actually posted the initial designs on Facebook to gauge how accurate I was and only ended up changing one at the advice of my instructor.

I'll go ahead an post the image first if you would like to take a guess, but don't scroll to far because the adjectives and reasoning are listed below.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I reworked one design, tweaked another and ended up having to completely redo three of them because they had glue spots on them. The adjective are shown left to right, top to bottom as follows:

Ordered
This one is relatively easy to convey. The first design was just four equal boxes forming a larger box shape. Then, I moved on to something that looked like the Purina logo. However, after reading a few of the synonyms for this word, I went with the design you see because it shows motion. It's almost as if they are coming off of an assembly line, all the same and orderly.

Increase
This one was the one the instructor suggested changing, mainly due to the other mostly black design that was the odd man out. The first design started with a small square in the bottom left hand corner. The other three became larger and larger as they moved up to the top right in an arc resembling a parabola. His words were that we were going to see a lot of similar designs and that I should try to use the negative space to show the word. I kind of cheated because I had no idea what to do. By cheating I mean that I googled the word 'increase' and looked at the image results. I saw a whole bunch of arrows and that is when the design you see now came to me.

Bold
This one gave me the most trouble. At first I wanted to use a large square next to a small one, but that didn't quite do it for me. This design was initially an idea for Increase, but when Josh said it made him think of 'adventure' I started thinking about it in a different way. Some people see it as tumbling or falling down a hill, but the bouncing motion created is supposed to convey boldly charging forward  and up the hill. The split responses I got on this one actually told me a bit about the person depending on which direction the squares were traveling to them... A lot more people on my Facebook are pessimists than I thought.

Congestion
Meh, I'm still not really pleased with this one. The synonyms made me think of crowding and tried to cram them into a small space. The angle was meant to make it feel more off kilter than if I had just put the square edges parallel to the frame edges. I don't know, could have been better.

Tension
This one gave me trouble at first, but as soon as I sketched this idea down, I knew it was the one. Tension can be seen a couple different ways. While many of my classmates were viewing it as the physical tension like you would see in a rope, I immediately went to the emotion behind the word. Tension is very negative and I associate many synonymous feelings with it like stress, anxiety, pressure, depression, etc. So, it's meant to be seen as the serene calm of the dark being cracked harshly causing a sort of sting that could be perceived as large or small..

Playful
I got a lot of really good synonyms on this one. Words like bouncy, floating, fun, and others were used by my friends on Facebook. These are all positive and upbeat feelings I wanted associated when looking at this design.

There you have it, finished design project numero uno. It gave me small fits of grief throughout the process, but over all it was pretty fun. Our next project is going to be about balance, but for now, I must study for our design quiz tomorrow. Thanks for checking in!