October 11, 2006 - Sketches and the Museum

It's been a while, but I've been busy as a bee! I wanted to tell you all about what I've recently been doing. I'm now in an oil painting1 class, and it's a bit different than the watercolor I was used to. Here if I make a mistake, I can just wipe it off or paint over it. Totally new concept! We've been doing a few exercises to get us used to painting with oils, like determining value by using only black and white paint. Value is the lightness or darkness of something, and as an artist it is essential to see that. We also painted some fruit, this time using color. We were trying to use the skill of value into color this time...I'm sorry I don't have pictures for either of those paintings - I am a little embarrassed at how both of those turned out anyway. :( Don't worry though, I'm slowly getting better and when I make a masterpiece I'll be sure to show you all. :) The other studio art class I am in is head drawing. This is a required class if you want to take figure drawing, and I do understand its importance because the face is the first thing you look at in a person, and if the proportions are wrong then nothing will be readable/believable...here, you try drawing a sketch of your spouse or friend, try really hard to draw them exactly as they are. When you are done, you will understand just what I'm talking about with just how difficult drawing a head of someone is...even someone you see every day, and you thought you memorized the face!! Honestly, I don't believe a single person in my head drawing class can render a drawing as perfectly as the person is. Not even me, people! Not even my brother, Matthew who is also an art major (I know you have to agree with me, Matt!). But I suppose the key isn't always to make a face look exactly like the person. Rather the key is to make the person you draw look like it could be someone real. When Michelangelo sculpted David, he didn't have the original man in front of him. And if you honestly look hard at it, the sculpture is merely an ideal of what a man really looks like. Nevertheless, what makes it a spectacular sculpture is not that it isn't the original David, but the artist sculpted a man that in every proportion looks believable, as if he really looked like that or that some man could actually be that physically perfect. This is what we as artists (or me anyway) are trying harder to accomplish: believability. first in my head drawing class, we were discussing the correct measurements and proportions in most human beings. And now we are working on identifying shadow. Shadow is seriously important on a face because it helps make the face look more 3d on a 2d paper. I wanted to show you one of the drawings I did:
 
this is a sketch of the shadow of the model in front of me. The neck probably looks a little scrawny to you, but that's because I wasn't drawing the neck, I was drawing the shadow on the neck. I also took a picture of the model (with her permission), so you can compare the picture with the shadow:

I'm pretty sure this picture I drew doesn't look exactly like the model (and by the way the models took breaks, so it couldn't always be exactly the same), but the point is when you look at the drawing, does the shadow look believable? as if that were the shadow of the face of a real woman? This is what I am slowly working on, and I have been struggling a lot in these two classes because they are both really new to me. It's all skills I haven't mastered and it may take my whole life to master them, but hopefully I'm making progress. They say if you can master the human body, then you can draw anything. I hope to get to this stage one day. oh, here is me showing off my chevrolet at the Idaho Paints Idaho museum! I'm excited to have my apinting make it there. Hope you are doing well!