August/September Update

Hello!

Here are my drawings over August and September. I've been pretty busy so I wasn't able to compile a post for August but I think I've been drawing pretty consistently still! I actually focused a bit more on figure drawing throughout August (twas getting tired of the Santa Clara area!), but a trip to San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest (Portland/Seattle) rejuvenated my environment sketching spirit! 

 A trip to the beach was very rejuvenating. I ended up unintentionally going to the beach 3 days in a row, all different ones (saying this makes me feel pretty hip lol, which is why I'm saying it now...). Definitely a great place to draw people though! 

sitting on the 2nd floor of the Caltrain is a great place to draw people without getting noticed:

 

I expanded my sketches to include not just one building but to try and capture the environment as a whole, and although my San Francisco sketches turned out a bit messy I was pretty happy with them on the day of because I felt I captured the movement and noise of the city. (I think doing a lot of gesture figure drawing helped me out there, and I also took an online workshop with Steve Huston which was very informative!). 

San Francisco:                                        Random Farmer's Market I went to, not chronological. I think                                                                I tried to make a story with the people and environment here.

      

After my classes ended I went on vacation to visit friends in Seattle and Portland! it was sooooo fun. I started out my Pacific Northwest journey a little messily (it was soo windy in Seattle and I had a hard time figuring out what to draw)! 

sooo windy:                                                                        view from friend's posh apt:

 

artist (me) drawing an artist at work (spray-painting in Seattle) + dog:

I ended up being able to get one decent drawing in Seattle and one in Portland so I was pretty satisfied! I've gotta say I really like Portland though such an awesome and hipster place!! Definitely hope to capture more of that hipster-ness on my next trip there.

I also drew some pictures on the back of postcards for my friends :) :

Quite poetically, my grey pen ran out of ink on what is probably to be my last environment drawing up here, and on a drawing of the building I was stuck in for the past several months. I probably subconsciously made it turn out that way, haha! Another reason for that though is because I wasn't able to find a place to buy the Hi-Tec Grey Pens up here. I ended up buying a light grey marker in Portland's Blick though (yay no sales tax!), so I started adding marker back into my drawings yay! (bc I ran out of my light marker colors, and I only had my dark ones left, but they were too dark so they intimidated me, but now that I have the light intermediary I feel comfortable venturing out again haha. Baby steps!!)

Goodbye Lucas Hall!! Hope I (never) see you again!! (Just kidding) 

That's all for now! Looking back over these past couple months I'm definitely happy with the progress I've made. This blog has been really helpful in keeping me motivated and reflecting on myself as well! Look forward to my continued posts!!

July Update!

Hello!

I am in the Bay Area this summer, and even though I don't have any art classes I am still allocating some time to practice what I've learned (almost) everyday :) I definitely feel I've improved a bit after spending more time on each piece and also becoming more patient. Honestly, drawing a box and then drawing into it was not really working for me, so instead I had myself be more conscious of the size of my drawings to make sure I got everything I wanted down on paper, then putting a box around it after. I think it works better for me (although in this case I probably need a couple more passes to fix things compositionally but I do like drawing this way for pure observational purposes!). I've also emphasized working more on the angles between lines and stuff in order to get my proportions correct (rather than perspective), and focusing a lot more on shapes and negative space. There are still random floating objects (bad habit aha), but I think it has been working well for me so far!

Using a grey pen has definitely gotten me more comfortable and confident with using a pen! Originally I got the grey pen so that I could do some value studies on top of my line drawings (and then the lines would be less visible) but... most of my drawings haven't gotten to that stage yet aha. So I'll just show the line drawings I have for now, and then I do eventually plan to go back and refine these drawings, maybe work on rearranging the compositions and then do several lighting studies on top (maybe this will be my goal for the next month). Looking at what I wrote last month... I found that a lot of the things I mentioned I was actually able to practice and work on! So hopefully by writing this down I will actually get around to doing it for this month too haha.

At the end of my time here I plan to put together a portfolio of all the drawings I've done up here, and refine each of my drawings (just like we do for CDA!). I thought it would be a neat project for me to look forward to (and to help me reflect on my time/drawings here and also improve!). Anyways, I'm just rambling now but that's what I have in store for the next couple months!

Here are my drawings!

Figure Drawing Update

Here a couple figure drawings I did recently that I feel show my progress. In particular I am pretty happy with the way the torso studies turned out. I definitely feel much improved! But I'm greedy so I want to get even better faster XD!! Anyways, here's to more drawing and improvement :)

Environment Sketching - April/May

These are some sketches I've been doing since class ended. I've been continuing to work on the things learned in class and a lot of searching for values and shapes. I've also been reverting back to line a bit as well. In general, just having fun! For my next set I will focus on creating compositions (no more floating objects/buildings) and creating more finished sketches (either on location or take it home to refine).

I'm reading Walt Stanchfield's Drawn to Life about gesture drawing and he mentioned some interesting things about "landscape gestures". It was in the chapter about angles and tension, and how we tended to draw things towards the horizontal or vertical, but if we angled things diagonally instead there would be more of a sense of movement and tension can be created as well. I tried it out with my figure drawings and I think they've improved! I haven't tried it out with my environment sketches yet but I will soon. The examples he had in the book were really simple but definitely captured the scene, and he mentioned how he started "drawing" instead of "copying" after he started thinking about angles he wanted in the scene. (He also mentioned how he drew the same scenes several times over.) Anyways, I thought this was interesting info to share with everyone!

Wk 4 Environment Sketch

Here is my HW for week 4. I only got one lighting study per scene sadly but I will continue working on them! I also did revisions on last week's HW and some black & white studies from life.

 I found myself wanting to draw the scene and then do the b&w studies on top afterwards (b/c my proportions sometimes get funky or I don't fit in as much as I intended to, etc.). Is that a good idea or should we just do the b&w shapes straight? Maybe mix them together?

 Corrected the above by raising the horizon and added some lighting. The scanner kind of upped the contrast  but I can show what it really looks like in class. Kinda had a hard to deciding how to light this scene, I realize I probably should've done the 3 small marker studies first...

I thought the round lights looked like paper lanterns so I tried to change them into such and wanted to make it look kind of like a festival night scene ^^. The scanner really made the darks a lot darker in this one so I can show the original in class. I spent too long on this so it took away time from me to do more studies... Definitely need more practice on lighting!

Here are pics for the B&W studies:

Here is some revised linework and some composition ideas I was toying with. I need to work on that, the pics look lopsided when I flip them around and stuff ><"