Interior Drawings

    Not much to share today, Allison and I each did one "finished" interior in charcoal for Drawing I. I'm trying to push away the lines in these to gain more space in the drawing, I still need to push more. Working on my final homework assignment and more interiors in ink next week should help. I do love working with lines though.

[Cody's charcoal interior]

    I've got some Perspective homework and hopefully some drawing for myself to do tonight so I'm gonna' get to it.

-Cody

    I found this one room in the Sill House and its so lovely, I'm so drawn to it. It has green walls and these gorgeous windows with shutters. There are two sculptures on the filing cabinets and I've drawn it twice now. This charcoal drawing is the second time I've drawn it. I'm cropping it though, I made the window too big. Although the left window was bigger than the right, It's just TOO big.

    I will post a photo of my pastel version for another day. I have pieces to upload and I'm going to start some scheduled posts so I don't forget to write on the blog. 

[Allison's charcoal interior]

-Allison

Back Into the Swing of Things

    Here we go, another reasonably scheduled update for anyone taking a look/reading. This week has been busy as I've said, yesterday I had drawing, and today I had perspective and painting today.

    In drawing we've been working with charcoal, which I have some experience with, but I don't feel like it's one of my strongest mediums. I'm going to use some charcoal pencils as well as the vine charcoal[light sticks of charcoal] to get into some harder, darker mark making.

[charcoal reflective study]

    We prepared the surface first by covering the page with a neutral tone, so that we could work in both a reductive and additive manner. The plane that the coffee pots are sitting on is a little off, but the pots themselves look reflective enough to me. Working with vine charcoal is very soft and smudgy, I like harder forms of charcoal, but this is very helpful to learn with.

[charcoal glass study]

    Since the vine is so soft, it's very easy to move around and make corrections very quickly simply by wiping it away. This one works a little better compositionally, though it's mostly centered. Our last drawings we did for the day were of drapery, which I find very fun to draw, I love all the angles and harsh shadows they can contain.

[charcoal drapery study]

    This one may not be the best spatially, but i feel that its texture and movement make it a successful study. I was struggling to get the light source more obvious, on colored paper I could have used white charcoal or cante. Good thing we get to start using some white next week.

    I've got plenty to keep me busy tonight/most nights and this weekend, with homework for drawing, painting, illustration and English. 

    Next Friday is the opening reception for the Annual Juried Student Exhibition. The show will feature work by students in all majors, including Allison and myself. The reception is Friday January 30, from 6:00 - 8:00 P.M. The Show will remain open until the 28 of March, normally open from 10:00 A,M. - 4:00 P.M in the Stillman Gallery.

    I invite anyone in the are to come see the show, there should be a lot of good work to see.

-Cody

"The sun is only a god, in perspective we control the sun. That must make us super-gods." -Skyfather Zallinger

    

Time To Get To more Work

    So Friday was my last day of the semester, I had my final in Perspective, and I should have done just fine. I understand the material well, I just rush and don't think clearly sometimes. So I'm not worried, I didn't really have a final in anything else. For our drawing, and painting classes we had home work as well as finishing our in class assignments to do.

    Tomorrow I'll be going in with Allison to get finished shots of some more of our work, especially or sculpture work. Since some of the smaller work may not be kept, and I'm going to try and cast my portrait I did around the time that we go back to school in January to submit to the juried show.

    I also plan on cleaning up one of my pieces from digital imaging for entry to the show as well. Either the crustaceous environment, with the lake in the cave. Or the last one I did here.

[Cody's bot hangar concept]

    There are a few things I definitely like about what I've got so far, and a few that I don't. I'm trying to pay more attention to the perspective, and the "camera"/viewers eye together so that the painting reads correctly. This one is almost there. I enjoy the energy that the designs of the robots have, I'm a fan of the prosthetic foot design on the mechs[giant robots]. The light sources don't entirely make sense though. So I'll push the lighting situation into something more "cinematic". 

[Cody's deep space painting]

    We actually lost power on the second to last day we were working on these paintings, so I ended up "finishing" it up at Allison's house over the weekend last week. I think it was a successful learning experience at least.

    the last few days in drawing we were working on cross-contour drawings like the cow skulls we had done, but with pen & ink. We mixed in a little cross-hatching[laying lines over each other in repetition at different angles] as well. These are a few of the studies we produced.

[Allison, and Cody's cross-contour/hatching drawings]

    Now that I've got some time to work on art for myself a little more frequently over the break, I'm getting to work right away. Starting tonight! I'll share some images and thoughts if they're worth sharing. I hope everyone is preparing for a good holiday no matter what/if you celebrate.

-Cody

    

The Perspective Thrill

    On Fridays I have my Perspective class in the mornings. Most of the class is spent going over different "methods" to achieve drawing different shapes, planes, and lines in linear perspective. There's a lot of measuring, angles, and connecting the dots involved. I actually quite enjoy doing it when we have a clear goal. ie. Draw this square as a cube in perspective. Like  in my math class I like figuring out the problem, and knowing that I've solved it correctly.

   
    My instructor calls it "the perspective thrill", which of course is now an ongoing joke with some of my other classmates. So I've got a picture that's a little more interesting to show though, I'll talk briefly about what we were working on in Drawing I yesterday.

[ellipse studies]

    We were studying how to draw ellipses in perspective[all of the classes concepts overlap] by practicing drawing more vases and cylindrical shapes. Instead of measuring though when we draw from life we learn about the things we know to be true about drawing circles in perspective. Like an ellipse should never have points, the half closer to you should be slightly larger than the one receding into space.

    So our understanding of mechanical, and visual perspective should allow us to create more accurate looking drawings even if they're not measured out perfectly. I'm going to be working on some environment concepts for a project I've been helping with off an on now for a while this week. Hopefully I can get some more accurate/believable perspective into the paintings.

-Cody