Fall 2018 Semester: Week 1

Well it has been a long time but I'm back and I'll have new sketches and paintings for you every week as I give you the low down on my studies in art school. I was largely absent during the summer months because I was taking classes during the accelerated summer session. They cram 15 weeks into 7 and half weeks. On top of that, the course work I was creating wasn't work I felt would be beneficial to share. But this semester I have 3 classes out of the 4 that I am taking that will provide interesting content each week. This will just be an interesting way to see how my skills progress from now until December too. So with that said, here is what I did this last week.

Still Life Painting Course

In my still life painting course, we started with a simple black and white study in oils. I haven't used oils in a while so this felt rather unsuccessful but my instructor assured me that it was still done well enough. I earned a B so there is that. I'm still unhappy with it.

I already completed this weeks still life last night and it was much more successful than this one so I look forward to sharing that one with next weeks post.

Expressive Heads and Hands Course

This course focuses only on heads and hands. The course uses charcoal and I hadn't drawn anything with human anatomy since the spring semester (if you remember I posted a lot of anatomy studies and clothed figure drawing sketches then). So it took some time to warm up and get the feel of the materials again.

The first thing we had to do was make a 5 step value scale, seen below. We had to use some blending, hatching, and clearly defined squares.

After that I had two 10 minute drawings of heads to make.

Both are very rough. I've never been good at timed drawings like these so it something I need to practice more as they can help you prioritize what is important in a subject. Learning to pick out what makes the subject unique and rendering it out is good practice for practicing observational skills when drawing.

The other drawings had no time limit so I was able to feel more comfortable with these.

Elements of Digital Painting Course

This course isn't focused so much on painting scenes digitally but learning to paint various types of surfaces and textures. The first week was just an attempt at getting a grasp at the software. I'm already very familiar with kind of stuff so I found it a little boring, but it never hurts to visit these basics.

First we had to make a value scale:

Then we had to paint various shapes and a couple of shapes of our choosing. I chose a star and a "disk" (flat cylinder) for my chosen shapes. The star seemed like it would make a relatively simple exercise a bit more challenging.

Conclusion

That does it for last weeks work. I have to get back to this weeks work now! When I'm done with that, I look forward to sharing that as well. Make sure to check back around the same time at the beginning of next week for that installment of my art education journey.