3/16/2021 – Homework 10: GE Assignment Draft
In the spirit of DeFeo, I tried to draw inspiration from plants and minerals. The wacky thing in the middle is supposed to ressemble a bismuth crystal. The plants are inspired by Roridula shrubs. While the overall format and focus and texture work, I think the style departs a lot from DeFeo in this draft. Mostly, it isn’t abstract enough. I may use this as a prototype for the next draft, or just as a foundation, adding additional layers on top of it. I will also consider using paint for the next draft.
3/5/2021 – Homework 8: Perspective Reflection
Over all, I think my strong suits with drawing perspective are getting the vanishing points right and drawing curves accurately. In terms of what I can improve in, well, there’s a lot. Primarily, I think I should use darker values more often. My pieces drift toward being very light, making their shading look less slick and making them hard to photograph. Another thing to work on is free handing more lines; I tend to use a ruler quite a lot. This isn’t necessarily a flaw, but I should certainly work on my free handing to increase my artistic speed and intuition. Finally, I would like to experiment with cross hatching more, rather than using only hatching.
2/12/2021 – Homework 6: Perspective Bullet Points
Just some observations and tips I wrote down from the article and videos on perspective:
- Parallel Perspective is more or less the simplest perspective, with only one vanishing point, located on the horizon line (aka 1 point perspective). Angular perspective has 2 vanishing points on the HL, the point of view being between them. 3 point perspective has 3 vanishing points, 1 of which is not on the horizon line.
- The horizon line always appears at the height of the viewer’s eyes. Keep in mind that the viewer’s perspective is quite subjective, and only shows a 2D slice of a 3D scene; many objects can be hidden from view, or look different than you might expect.
- Errors often occur because lines do not converge to the same point, creating warped looking shapes. Warping can also occur if angles are simply too tight for the shape to make sense; for example, a cube with three vanishing points cannot have angles less than 90 degrees.
- Many shapes can be drawn in perspective by working from a “wireframe” cube or other basic 3D shape. Similarly, drawing larger “wireframe” walls (perhaps even with a grid) into a scene can help you line everything up with the vanishing points.
- Vanishing points can be outside of the frame. In fact, it can be helpful to leave a border of white space around the actual frame, just for drawing the lines to the vanishing points. For one point perspective, one can also draw a large cross centered on the vanishing point to help align objects with it.
- In addition to the vanishing points, remember to align objects to one another. For instance, when creating the second doorframe in a room, you should draw a line along the wall from the top of the first doorframe, in order to ensure they are the same height.
- For grids, steps, or anything that involves repeated lines, remember that the space between lines gets smaller the further away from you it gets.
1/29/2021 – Homework 3: Value, Reading, Bullet Points and Drawing
My attempt at a background and foreground value using charcoal.
