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My first semester in college, and what I have to show for it.
Shurakai
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey Guys, this is my first time posting in here (besides perhaps the doodle thread on occasion). I really felt out of place in this board, like if I posted here I was just a pretender and not good enough etc. So, now that I have some actual art edumacation in me (the only art class I have take other than this college course was in Grade 8), I feel brave enough to maek poast.
Now, I went into this feeling that I could do it, but Its really thanks to my awesome professors that some of my work came out like it did. This is only the first semester of the first year as well, so hopefully they take us beyond decent into 'really good' territory. I'll post mostly drawings, a few paintings (painting was brand new to me, and it shows, but oh well).
First they had us do a couple drawings before class even started so that they could measure our skill I suppose. Each drawing is 20 minutes.
Self Portrait in a mirror:
Draw your Hand:
So sure, mabye I had come to class with a little bit of skill. I hadn't really used it before though, so it kind of suprised me. Next we were asked to draw a fake flower from life.
This bloody thing must have taken me 4 hours to draw:
Also, I apologize if any of these are too bright for your screen. The next ones are darker, I promise.
After this they moved us to drawing our hands additive/reductive like with graphite. One pic with nothing in your hand, and one with an "object of importance".
Now stuff gets to big to scan, so sorry for the quality, my camera is kind of crap. After this we moved on to some still lifes involving basic shapes. Additive reductive charcoal:
Halloween rolls around:
After this phase (many drawings were done, im not gonna post-em-all), we moved on to self portraits. Alot of self portraits. The next two are done in black and white conte on flannel paper.
For this one we made a our own mask do spice things up a bit.
Next we moved on to Ink. Here is me experimenting with an ink brush, trying to get it down. They go in order from first to last: Top right, Top left, bottom left, bottom right.
This ink we did by making our own pens out of the local tree branches and carving them to a nib:
One of the Last projects he let us do was a personal drawing, basically whatever you want in whateve medium you want. It came out okay, but I could do better. Its based on a short story idea i've had cooking for awhile. I really, really want to fix the arm, haha.
Now on to PAINTING, horray!
A ribbon! Black and white with a glaze.
Ok, not so horray. These are ok, but nothing awesome. I want to pursue it a bit more eventually, though.
A still life! With fabric and actual color paint! omg death...
I actually like this next one. Basic Idea was to use underpainting to make something that looks cool. This one is titled too, I liked it so much. "David clutching queens heart". Its tied into that short story idea I mentioned earlier.
Where the magic happens. Yes, my schoolmates wear costumes randomly. Its awesome, don't worry.
For one of the final paintings, he wanted us to do an abstract piece. My teacher really liked how it came out, anyway.
And so, that is all I am gonna show ya, cause I have other paintings but they are horrible, oh so horrible.
Thank you all, you've been a kind audience.
Edit: Feel free to comment as well. While we do have critiques in class, it'd be nice to hear the opinions of others.
Now, I went into this feeling that I could do it, but Its really thanks to my awesome professors that some of my work came out like it did. This is only the first semester of the first year as well, so hopefully they take us beyond decent into 'really good' territory. I'll post mostly drawings, a few paintings (painting was brand new to me, and it shows, but oh well).
First they had us do a couple drawings before class even started so that they could measure our skill I suppose. Each drawing is 20 minutes.
Self Portrait in a mirror:
Draw your Hand:
So sure, mabye I had come to class with a little bit of skill. I hadn't really used it before though, so it kind of suprised me. Next we were asked to draw a fake flower from life.
This bloody thing must have taken me 4 hours to draw:
Also, I apologize if any of these are too bright for your screen. The next ones are darker, I promise.
After this they moved us to drawing our hands additive/reductive like with graphite. One pic with nothing in your hand, and one with an "object of importance".
Now stuff gets to big to scan, so sorry for the quality, my camera is kind of crap. After this we moved on to some still lifes involving basic shapes. Additive reductive charcoal:
Halloween rolls around:
After this phase (many drawings were done, im not gonna post-em-all), we moved on to self portraits. Alot of self portraits. The next two are done in black and white conte on flannel paper.
For this one we made a our own mask do spice things up a bit.
Next we moved on to Ink. Here is me experimenting with an ink brush, trying to get it down. They go in order from first to last: Top right, Top left, bottom left, bottom right.
This ink we did by making our own pens out of the local tree branches and carving them to a nib:
One of the Last projects he let us do was a personal drawing, basically whatever you want in whateve medium you want. It came out okay, but I could do better. Its based on a short story idea i've had cooking for awhile. I really, really want to fix the arm, haha.
Now on to PAINTING, horray!
A ribbon! Black and white with a glaze.
Ok, not so horray. These are ok, but nothing awesome. I want to pursue it a bit more eventually, though.
A still life! With fabric and actual color paint! omg death...
I actually like this next one. Basic Idea was to use underpainting to make something that looks cool. This one is titled too, I liked it so much. "David clutching queens heart". Its tied into that short story idea I mentioned earlier.
Where the magic happens. Yes, my schoolmates wear costumes randomly. Its awesome, don't worry.
For one of the final paintings, he wanted us to do an abstract piece. My teacher really liked how it came out, anyway.
And so, that is all I am gonna show ya, cause I have other paintings but they are horrible, oh so horrible.
Thank you all, you've been a kind audience.
Edit: Feel free to comment as well. While we do have critiques in class, it'd be nice to hear the opinions of others.
Shurakai on
0
Posts
thread.
You're at the point right now where you've just recently begun your journey of artistic improvement, so specific critique really isn't very productive in general right now because you have so much to work on Its just pointless.
I think school is a great environment for learning, but something you should keep near and dear to your thoughts is that you don't need "academic edumacation" to be a great artist. Something that you'll probably soon learn, if you haven't already, is that nobody can teach you how to draw or paint. The best anyone can do is help you to teach yourself. Simply going to school doesn't make anyone more or less of an artist. It's what you put into it on your own time that decides that.
And now for just about the only piece of relevant 'critique' that I can offer:
Observation right now should be your absolute modus operandi as an artist. It sounds ridiculous, but you (and every fledgling draftsman) need to learn how to see. The faces are the most telling evidence of this. It's a little difficult to explain and honestly some of the specifics are probably a little pseudo-sciency, but the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards goes into great detail describing how to observe life as it is.
The gist of the book is that as people, we can only store so much detail about familiar objects in our memories--we don't normally have the capacity to take precise photographic snapshots of the things we see around us every day. Instead we internalize crude simplified versions of those objects that are only so detailed as to allow us to recognize the real thing when we see them.
So when a person looks into the eyes of another person, or at their own in a mirror, they quickly compare that against their internalized file-cabinet of objects and go "Yep, that's an eye!". The same thing happens when an untrained artist makes a drawing as well. Tell him to draw the eye of the model in front of him and the same process happens: he looks at the eye only so long as it takes to flip through his internal roll-o-dex and recognize it as "an eye" and then from then on he's on autopilot drawing from his internal version rather than actually looking at the model in front of him, whether he realizes it or not. This is where "foot-ball" shaped eyes come from.
To become a skilled artist you need to learn to abandon referencing those internal versions completely and make every single stroke of your pencil be motivated by something you observed from your reference, rather than pre-conceived ideas of how things "should" look. Once you can do that, the rest of your life will be spent learning how to IMPROVE your internal library through ceaseless study of life, so that eventually your internal visual references aren't crude and simplified, but you have spent so much time refining them that they approach the real deal.
I hope that makes any sense at all to you right now. Out of curiosity, what kind of school are you attending?
As for the school, I live in a city of around 80,000 and this is the major college of said city. Its not specifically an art school, but all of the professors are really, really awesome and I'm quite enjoying the experience.
I'm doing it for fun.
I can afford it because I have a decent job, and after I'm done my two year diploma I am going to head into the music program. Again for fun. And then probably start some "real" stuff like doing some humanities and going into education.
I really don't care if its "worthless" in a monetary sense, because to me there is no point in life if you don't actually live it how you want.
I'm sorry if explaining something using big scary words and abstract concepts makes you confuse me for being pretentious and off-topic. Maybe I should ninja edit my post down to a single line and then act like a dick in someone else's thread to seem more pedestrian!
I started college as an art major and ended in Biology.
I can honestly say art took up more of my time, and can be a very challenging field simply because of the demands it makes on your time.
The advice I would give myself if I could go back and do it all over again is do 2x the work assigned, and stop waiting until the last minute.
Man, Scos, you are sooooo pretentious. Like, pretenses everywhere.
Shurakai, Scosglen gave you better advice than I can give, so I'm just going to wish you all the best in your study. Which school are you in, exactly?