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Art Class Giving Headaches
Mim
I prefer my lovers…dead.Registered User regular
I prefer my lovers…dead.Registered User regular
I don't know if this belongs in the Art corner or here, but I figured here might be better.
I'm in intermediate drawing, and I enjoy drawing as much as I enjoy writing. One day, I would like to take those two and enhance them as a career, so I am trying harder to improve. Unfortunately, I am in a drawing class where we have to research artists and write about their techniques. I'm kind of stumped because I don't know if there are names for certain techniques or am I supposed to go "Oh, the lines vary in length and thickness, creating interesting lines that keeps the eyes moving".
I'm also using pastels and in my own time, working with inks. I know to post these in AC, but in class when I ask for help, I don't really feel like I'm getting help. I expected a day or two on the techniques we could do with pastels and how to use them properly. Instead, we were kind of thrown in there and she comes around and helps us maybe for five minutes or ten minutes, sometimes fixing things herself. She says "uh, um, er" a lot, which distracts me. I'm trying to learn, but thus far in all of my art classes it's been a 15 minute tutorial and then "OFF YOU GO". I don't know if this is how it's supposed to be.
So, for the TL;DR crowd:
When I'm writing about an artists' techniques, how do I do it if I don't even know if there are names and such.
And two, am I supposed to be teaching myself art mostly with minor instruction from the teacher, or is there supposed to be more to this? I've asked her for a day tutorial but she shot it down.
edit: also, how does one interpret paintings? Like abstract ones and such. I like the De Stijl era of the paintings, but I couldn't give you an interpretation of one. And she's asking us to also do that when we visit museums, to interpret the deeper meanings of paintings. I don't know if this is something taught to art majors (I'm an art minor) or what. Any tips?
edit^2 : Also, do you guys have any art magazine recommendations? I'm not sure which would be best.
I'm in intermediate drawing, and I enjoy drawing as much as I enjoy writing. One day, I would like to take those two and enhance them as a career, so I am trying harder to improve. Unfortunately, I am in a drawing class where we have to research artists and write about their techniques. I'm kind of stumped because I don't know if there are names for certain techniques or am I supposed to go "Oh, the lines vary in length and thickness, creating interesting lines that keeps the eyes moving".
I'm also using pastels and in my own time, working with inks. I know to post these in AC, but in class when I ask for help, I don't really feel like I'm getting help. I expected a day or two on the techniques we could do with pastels and how to use them properly. Instead, we were kind of thrown in there and she comes around and helps us maybe for five minutes or ten minutes, sometimes fixing things herself. She says "uh, um, er" a lot, which distracts me. I'm trying to learn, but thus far in all of my art classes it's been a 15 minute tutorial and then "OFF YOU GO". I don't know if this is how it's supposed to be.
So, for the TL;DR crowd:
When I'm writing about an artists' techniques, how do I do it if I don't even know if there are names and such.
And two, am I supposed to be teaching myself art mostly with minor instruction from the teacher, or is there supposed to be more to this? I've asked her for a day tutorial but she shot it down.
edit: also, how does one interpret paintings? Like abstract ones and such. I like the De Stijl era of the paintings, but I couldn't give you an interpretation of one. And she's asking us to also do that when we visit museums, to interpret the deeper meanings of paintings. I don't know if this is something taught to art majors (I'm an art minor) or what. Any tips?
edit^2 : Also, do you guys have any art magazine recommendations? I'm not sure which would be best.
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Are you trying to color with pastels? Or just black and white drawings on newsprint?
It wasn't until my third year till I had a media class. The teachers would give some pretty nice demos, but most of it was just trying to get a feel for it yourself.
Your teacher really should do a full demo for your class. Try to get other students to push your professor into working along side you guys so you can stop by and see what they do. The quickest way to learn is to copy master artists.
EDIT: You interpret paintings through studying art history. You really need to be fairly educated in the entirety of fine art to really understand modern or contemporary artists. So, take some art history classes. All of them.
Art really is mostly self study. Art school just gives you the facilities and allows you to communicate with other like minded people. The rest is up to you.
And we're coloring with pastels. We're focusing more on technique than perspective, form, etc. which is why I'm concerned if there are names for techniques or am I just supposed to know right off the bat what kind of technique it is and how to describe it. We focused on perspective, form and such in beginner art and even that was short. Ten minute tutorial, then a project. They'd remind us of it and say how the light was supposed to bring about form, but that was about it. My teacher for beginner art was more obsessed with shading than form.
is the most compact and useful tutorial ever.
There really is no technique that can be taught in art. I really don't know your skill level so its hard to say.
Maybe you should make a thread in the AC with your figure drawings.
Would it have to be meshed into the "Questions, Tips, Tutorials" section? If not, we can move it to AC, but if so I can copy/paste the OP.
For actual advice, Wakka is right, on both accounts. If you cant get into those art history classes I would rent out the text books for those classes from your library and at least scan through them. You can find both books on art history and art criticism, the later will help you just understand some ways to write about art, the former will give you a base knowledge of art.
your teacher sounds kinda weak, it happens. Wakka is right though Self study is extremely valuable.
Well, finding out the names for certain techniques would be part of doing the research, naturally.
The format seems sound enough, though I would think that 15 minutes might be a bit short for a demo, especially for something involving color. Classes are large, and it's hard to get around and give a lot of personal attention to each individual student in a space of 3 hours.
However, even given an ok format, the instruction could be either good or bad. Does the demo just involve her making a picture, or does she explain in clear terminology why she is making the decisions she is making in terms of the principles involved (construction, perspective, light, shade, etc.)? Is her own art of high technical and aesthetic quality (the latter being subject to your own opinion, of course)? Fixing things in a student's drawing is fine, but this has to be accompanied by a clear and non-ambiguous explanation of what she is doing and why in order to be useful to the student.
Absolutely there is more to it. You cannot, unless you in class drawing for at least 30 hours a week for years, being taught be extremely high-caliber teachers, rely on any class to give you all that you need to learn about art and become successful at doing art. Most of the artist I know that are really good keep large libraries of books, both about art instruction and artist's works that they study from, and are very self motivated towards teaching themselves. This isn't to say that this is more important than taught instruction in general (good teachers can be an absolute godsend), but that whatever your situation, your appetite for learning about art and your appetite for drawing needs to be constant, voracious, and insatiable.
Beats me. I went to art college and whenever this came up I just BSed my way out of it using some fancy vocabulary skills and erring on the side of (Dave Barry wrote a column about this once about writing Literature papers)* choosing a thesis that's totally ridiculous, because it'll be more interesting than the 400 other papers that the teacher has to read that says 'The Mona Lisa is a picture of an enigmatic woman'. You'd be better off arguing that the Mona Lisa was about Leonardo seeing Michelangelo's David and getting pissed off at the sweet press that big burly muscleman statue was getting and decided to make something at the complete opposite end of the scale just to rock everyone out of that fad. I mean, I just pulled that out of my ass, and as far as I know there's no actual evidence to back that up, but academia is far less about petty things like "the facts" and more about putting forward an interesting argument, even if it's a stupid one.
Besides (and I know I'll cop a lot of shit for this), if you're going into commercial art, being able to interpret meaning out of modern/post-modern art is a largely useless skill. I do video game art for a living, and half of the challenge of doing that work is to make everything as obvious as humanly possible, so even if the player is a drunk and mad imbecile, they still won't have to interpret shit to figure out what's going on. If your interest is purely about commercial applications or you don't care about modern fine art where interpretation in a big factor, don't worry too much about it.
*
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So then there are certain names for certain techniques? I have been going around google looking for "Art techniques" and mostly coming up with people writing about their processes than going "Oh this is [insert technique name] and this is how you do it."
When going to the museum today to go look at paintings and write about their techniques I did mostly the "The lines seem deliberate and well planned out" or "Colors seem to shift in tone and are used to enhance one another making this yellow more cool than it originally would be considered on its own" but I felt like I was writing anything with substance.
Well, she talks about cools and warms a lot, but not really why she's doing it. I also find that when going over my drawings, she'll want me to put yellow where I don't see yellow. She didn't say if this was because of how she saw it or if it tied the drawing together more cohesively by having the color appear in odd places (like say, on black fabric in the background).
And I've never seen her art except when she's editing mine. I've never seen any of my teachers' works actually. They didn't present anything to us or have any of their stuff hanging up. And it's been this way with all of my art teachers at my university.
There are names for techniques/styles/schools of thought, some more pointed than others, but you are really looking for art history. I suggest the library over Google. Writing about what you see with no basis in whats happened historically is going to feel hollow, because you would be essentially just be explaining whats in front of you and not comparing it to anything else.
While I agree with AOB that you can be mostly ridiculous, I actually encourage you to read about art history that you like and dive into it because you want to. I loved interpreting native american and ancient art, and while its alot of speculation its interesting and fun to me, and I can extrapolate my own feelings to get some writing.
Your teacher sounds like maybe shes not the most helpful. I dont know how flexible your institution is, but I did alot of research at my school and made sure I was getting teachers that I could communicate with. If you feel like you cant ask questions and get good information, then the class isnt benefiting you. This is assuming that you are actively asking questions and piping up when you are confused.
Most of that stuff you'll learn through an Art history or Modern Art class. When you basically go through the -isms [Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, etc etc] you'll pick up different styles and techniques that famous artists have used. And these classes really are helpful to learn how to talk art.
For techniques you'll want to look at Impressionism [Manet, Renoir] and Post impressionism [Seurat, Van Gogh, Cezanne]. There you can see a few different ways of applying paint or displaying light.
When you get to late cubism stuff or post cubism stuff like de Stijl it's less about Technique and more about concept. If you look at the Bauhaus artists you may find some nice color theory and a lot of cool architecture but not much drawing/painting technique to apply to your class.
I'm trying to build up the nerve to ask more questions. Like, I asked her "Could we do a tutorial for pastels" she said "Well, how about you work a bit more on your drawing and when you need help, ask for me and we'll see where you're at". I'm very, I guess the word is "submissive" when it comes to teachers. I don't feel as though I have the cojones to question them or ask them for more things in fear of them snapping at me and they end up not liking me. I know I suffer in the end for that, but it's mostly why I feel comfortable asking here than in person (though I currently feel like an idiot for asking this stuff).
I'll go by the library on campus and see what they have in the way of art history books. We're not allowed access to the books in the student store right now till next semester. Actually, my dad his a history book (he's taking an art history class but not the one I need), so I will scan through there.
I really am looking for more ways to improve though, and I think constantly about putting work up in AC, but my anxiety gets the better of me. I don't see a lot of people starting from the absolute beginning there, and it freaks me out and I begin the self-loathing that comes natural to me and my feelings towards my work. I'm trying to overcome that, but I hate showing my work even to my family and friends. My anxiety has become better in a lot of ways, but with my writing and drawing, it's slowly progressing towards a middle point, but that fear still lingers like a bad habit. That, and my major consists of writing a lot of papers and reading a lot of stories, so that work load is clashing with the art work load. I'm trying to accommodate both but it's becoming a weird balancing act.
Well, there are a few certain terms, but knowing what they're doing and describing it is pretty much the same thing. I feel like you're expecting these techniques to be 'ooh magic secrets', but they're not. Don't stress out about vocabulary.
If you want a good place to start on this sort of thing, James Gurney's posts on painting techniques might be helpful: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/search/label/Paint%20Technique
As for your teacher, again, it's hard to tell without seeing her in action, and if you're making a point of interjecting with, "I'm not sure what you mean by this" or "Why did you add this yellow here? I don't see yellow when I look up there." It could just be her whimsy, or not; it's important, whether you agree with her or not, to know her motivations for her decisions. If you were at an academy doing sight-size drawing training you be assured that the decisions being made were being made for the sake of accuracy; with a random teacher from a university, who knows what their objective is.
Unfortunately, the never seeing your teacher's work is something common in many colleges; there's an argument to be made this is to prevent biasing the students one way or another, but in many cases it just conceals the fact that the teacher isn't that great to begin with, and maybe shouldn't be teaching. A lot of people get very expensive degrees going through art school and not coming out having learned a damn thing as a result. Don't be swayed just because some idiot as some point gave someone the title of "teacher". Be swayed if, and only if, the teacher can actually teach. If not, seek help elsewhere.
Ideally, you would seek out teachers whose work you like and respect, and learn from them, learning the way they learned.
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Edit: Pulled a few up myself.
www.marilynholsing.com
http://richardhricko.com/
http://www.samanthasimpson.com/
http://www.larryspaid.com/paintings.html
http://www.rochelletoner.com/
Definitely check out the faculties' work!
The important thing about modern artists is they were like, welp, photography is killing us. Now what do we do? Technilogical change and all that jazz is important too. I do feel an artist does better work when they are a little bit more self aware. Especially in the computer age.
Looking at contemporary artist though I feel a lot of them are dropping the ball. Conceptual art and abstract art I just do not get.
My intermediate teacher gave us a list of artists to research, and I am using google to look up their works and such. I just felt like there was a more artist way to describe the painting than just (like when I was looking at Piet Mondrian's work from the De Stijl era
my computer imaging teacher though plans to give us lectures on contemporary artists and pushes us to study them more with magazines out there on the news stands. I never know which art magazine to pick up though.
It's always a good idea to at least think of the some criteria when judging art:
Line - Is it angular? Horizontal and vertical? Diagonal? Curvey? Outlines?
Color - What kind of colors? Bright? Is it the focus? Are the colors realistic, exaggerated or abstract?
Composition - Is it symmetrical? Does it have a foreground/middle/background?
Form - Is there a lot of depth? Abstract or Realistic?
Shape - What kind of shapes? Cubist-like grid shapes? Circular? Polygonal?
You can add things like Value or Texture as well if it pertains to the piece.
By have some criteria to judge art you can then establish trends or differences a lot easier. It's helped me a lot by going through this checklist when looking at art.
With Mondrian's work you mentioned line, color and shape and it's definitely a great start! But you didn't mention what kind of lines or kinds of color. Being artsy isn't much more complicated then what you've said really, just be a little more specific!
Oh, thank you for this check list! I will definitely use it when looking at artist techniques and what I think about them. This will definitely make me feel a bit better when writing.
Hrm. Going by their portfolios, if it were my money, I wouldn't trust any one of these teachers to teach me traditional, commercially applicable art skills, regardless of how awesome an essay they can write on their interpretation of an abstract expressionist painting. I'd probably get more bang for my buck out of books and Gnomon/Massive Black DVDs.
But that's just me, and my tastes and interests. If their work impresses you, and go 'man I wish I could draw like that', then yeah, that's a good teacher to suit for purpose.
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I'm much more interested in comic art (sequential art, I believe it's called? In my drawing classes we haven't really talked about post-modern, cubism, etc. we just draw. but we research those on our own, which I have been doing) but I know I have to go through learning about anatomy and composition to get to that point first, which is what I'm trying to do.
My beginning art class we were told to steer clear of line, so it baffled me when I saw a lot of kids in my intermediate class using lines first instead of shading the entire paper and working with light.
Also, I must ask this because it keeps coming up...why do most art teachers hate Bob Ross?
I understand where you're coming from, though. Looking back on it, we didn't learn a great deal from our professor(s), and there is definitely room for them to teach.
While a lot of art is figuring stuff out for yourself, there are things that you can be taught that as a beginner you may not figure out. Such as certain aspects of how light works, certain techniques, certain techniques for differentiating values, etc.
Pastels are hard because they are really almost a painting medium. What I mean by that is that they primarily use color, instead of line, like a pencil or pen would. This makes it kind of difficult because one of the things that beginners have to most problem with when drawing whats in front of them is with value (lightness or darkness). A good exercise would be to draw a still life with charcoal or something else that is primarily black and white, and then try drawing it again with pastels.
Drawing what's around you is really going to be the only way to improve. Draw literally everything around you.
That said, if you are interested or drawn to pastels you should look at the impressionist painters and see what they're doing with color and how they're using it to describe form. Cezanne in particular. See what you like and don't like.
-Cezanne
-Gaugan
-Matisse
-Monet
-Degas
There are more, obviously.
Also, regarding pastels, try different color papers. Dark, light, greys, colors, etc. Working on white with pastels is much more difficult than working on colors.
A big part of my progression was also just looking at artists I liked and seeing and really trying to analyze why my pictures looked different than there's, why there's was better than mine.
Just look at a lot of art, and adopt what you like.
There is a book called "The Artists Handbook", you should look at the section on pastels in there. "The Pastelist's Year" is also pretty great. Try pastel pencils, they are a lot easier to be accurate with than regular pastels, in my opinion. It is just pastel but in a wood pencil, like instead of graphite. The faber-castell brand ones are pretty great.
Feel free to PM me if you want to know anything else or really have any questions about anything. I go to school for illustration and work in an art store.
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When it comes to the line vs. not line thing, this is the sort of thing that happens when teachers insufficiently explain what they're teaching, either because of the short time they actually have with their students, or because they themselves were not taught why their methods are what they are. When if comes to toning a paper and doing everything entirely through tone, yes, there are benefits- it forces you to break your elementary school drawing habits and see in terms of shapes of light and dark, essential ideas for developing form through shade, and a good primer for stepping into impressionist-style painting. On the other hand, doing this skips over a lot of other essential bits- namely how to work out construction, perspective, and gesture- everything that makes the figure hold together as a solid, believable human being. The truth is you need both skills, and you need to know how they interrelate, in order to create a truly effective drawing.
This is the sort of thing that results from a college environment. Back in Ye Olden Days, artist would train by apprenticing to another artist for a period of years, learning their master's technique as thoroughly as possible before moving on, and taking their own spin on it. It was a successful system, and produced a hell of a lot of great artists. In college, you're lucky to get 4 months with a teacher before moving onto the next, who may have an entirely different, if not outright contradictory, way of working, and you may find yourself back at square one.
This is why it's so essential to supplement your teaching with books- so you can develop a steady path on your own towards the goals you want to achieve, because your teachers aren't going to do it for you. Especially if you're in a school focused on abstract fine art (as it seems to be) and you want to comic art (which requires you to be able to pull out any prop, perspective, or figure at any angle under any lighting condition under very tight deadlines with little to no reference, which is-and this is a massive understatement- incredibly difficult, even for the most talented.)
And on the Bob Ross question, naturally there's going to be resentment by people that spent a lot of time writing about the brilliance of plain red canvases in order to be considered an artist, and then have some dude with an afro make a fuckload more money than they ever will by painting some cheesy paintings of happy trees. But there's also the Leonardo Da Vinci's answer, which art teachers would point out if they had thought to study art history far back enough to the point where it very much was a 'hard knocks' kind of affair:
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As for the line vs. line thing, yeah, we did gestures but they were more ...squiggly than actually forming whole body parts. So I've been trying to do line in class, but I keep falling back on to not using line and going with colors and light.
I have worked with vine charcoal and trying to color with pastels over my charcoal. Would working with graphite also work with putting my drawings together and then coloring over them with pastels?
Also, do you guys have any art magazine recommendations? I'm not sure which would be best.
In general it can be very difficult to learn to be a professional artist at any accredited university, with a few significant exceptions. But I think the cheaper and easier path is to find a small school such as the one I attend.
Would those then be better to follow up with after finishing my degree?
I take issue with this slightly. You can absolutely begin to interpret any work from any background - how a piece affects the observer is worthy of note no matter their level of expertise. If you like a certain period or style, think about why and how it makes you feel and you've got something to work with. Art is about thinking about what is presented, what the intent was and the emotions it brings.
I'm not saying that art history knowledge won't help give a wealth of context to that - it's much easier to understand the intentions of an artist when you know the social and environmental factors around the creation of the work, and it helps to know what has gone before when looking at a recent piece. The more experience you have and the more you know the more perspective you will have on any given piece or collection. But even with no knowledge of art history at all your interpretations and opinions are valid.
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Contemporary artists are allowed to work the way they do because of the artist's before them. Trying to interpret a picture based off raw emotion is valid, but its only a fraction of what can be seen.
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American Artist drawing magazine is usually pretty good, I pick that up at Borders occasionally.
Illustration magazine and ImagineFX also seem pretty cool, but I never see them on the racks anywhere.
Though if I had to guess, I'd suspect your teachers aren't talking about any of those magazines, but more something like Artforum which is more about the contemporary fine art scene.
Depends on when you'll have the time and money to do it. If you can do them concurrently, I would see no reason to wait. If your reticence is more along the lines of 'oh I need to learn the basics from my degree program before going to someplace like that...", that's not true and is a dumb reason to not do it. If you want to get good as fast as possible, take advantage of the best resources at your disposal as soon as possible. If you can get better art training outside of your school and you feel what you're getting from your school is just wasting your time, drop the art minor and just take classes where you think you're actually learning something. (Despite what your college's faculty are going to tell you, no employer outside of a college gives two shits about whether you have an art degree or not. It's all about how well you can draw what the employer wants you to draw.)
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Well, I'd do them concurrently if I had the time (my major is busy as well) and the money to do so. Right now, next semester is pretty much all I have guaranteed at the moment because my father, my co-signer, recently lost his job. After I get my degree and have my own job I wouldn't mind taking on the task of going to a smaller art school or atelier.
Right now, I have this school which I'll be trying to get the most out of and outside resources like this form, concept art and other websites out there as well as my practice.
I know cus I was in the 50 issue
Yeah, I'm hoping to find ImagineFX and American Artist Drawing Museum in borders soon. If their new magazines are out.
And my school isn't alone. The inadequacies of art education in this country (and honestly most others) as far as preparing people for a real career in art are....well... staggering.
edit: I found my current teacher's portfolio: http://pamelabchapman.com/
I like her "rivers" work, but everything else kind of leaves me cold.
Look at your anxiety this way - if you post it in the AC, you'll get better faster, and you're going to have to show it to employers eventually if you want to get a job in art. So, get practice at taking criticism.
(Not like I can say much I don't post anything of my own either, haven't found anything good enough to post yet. :P)
I joined the AC and began posting when I was 15. I'm 20 now, and not to toot my own horn, but the improvements are staggering. I'm also in my senior year of school majoring in Illustration, but the AC motivated me to get better in the 2 years before I even entered college. Motivated me to be a better artist, and to be able to take critiques with out hating my self, my art, or the people critiquing me. It gave me a thicker skin, and I got better a lot faster than if I hadn't been posting or involving my self in the critiques of others.
If it makes you feel better, this is from my very first post in the AC when I first joined PA 5-6 years ago:
And here's something more recent:
I chalk that improvement up to hard work and posting my shit in the AC so they could tear me apart.
Check out my art! Buy some prints!