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Archive for the ‘Drawing’ Category

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Sunday, January 25th, 2015

onefootfigure

It has been a busy week! I had a SAQA meeting on Wednesday and lots of SDA work. Here is an update on the drawing class. We had our last session this week and he showed us how to draw the whole body and show different postures. Drawing a skellie first can help you get the right angles on the body parts. For instance, the above drawing was taken from this skellie.

skellie

Did you know that the perfect proportioned body is 8 heads tall, but most of us are 7 – 7 1/2. The torso is two heads, the pelic area is one head and the legs are 4 heads. So you can take a piece of paper and divide it into 8 portions to draw your pefect human specimen. The photo’s perspective is off because the drawing was on the table.

8headfigure2

Another interesting fact is that an infant is 3 heads tall. Many paintings of babies have the head too small. As a child grows, the number of heads change. We also practiced other figure positions. This one is supposed to be standing on his right foot.

leaningfigure

Here is another figure that I did.

8headstall

I doubt that I will be doing a lot of figure drawing, but I so enjoyed this process.  It has made me look at figures in paintings with a whole new eye. Next week, we start reduction printing. I am going to assist the teacher. I hope I get to participate, too.

I was able to get to the studio one day and made a lot of progress getting the fabric stash under control. I also painted some silk samples. I think I am going to paint silk for my solo show instead of dyeing. I worry about the cool weather and getting the depth of color that I want. I used Jacquard’s Dynaflow paint on silk charmeuse and silk/cotton blend. I decided that I like the heavier weight charmeuse best. It is on the second fabric, below.

silkpainttest1

wilkpainttest2

So, today, I ordered 15 yards of silk charmeuse from Dharma and copious amounts of Dynaflow paint. I can’t wait until it gets here.

Thursday was Mr C’s 75th birthday. On Friday night we went out with Jack and Steph to a marvelous French restaurant in our neighborhood where we had a most excellent meal. Then we had birthday cheesecake back at The Congdo with M & M. It is always fun to catch up with these two and hear how well they are doing in school and life.

My new glasses came in early and I must say, they have really made a difference. So  happy to be done with the eye strain and headaches. Who knew?? LOL

Yesterday, Terry Grant and I drove south about an hour and so to see the Stitches in Bloom show at the Oregon Garden. We both had work in the show. It was an interesting show with art quilts and traditional quilts sharing the same crowded space. There were quite a few vendors selling quilt fabric and notions. We had a nice lunch at the resort restaurant and then listened to a lecture by Cynthia Corbin from the Seattle area. I so love her work. Click here for a look at her website, if you are not familiar with her work. She has great sense of humor, too. I am looking forward to her workshop with the guild in March.

Here is a blurry photo of my leaf quilt at the show.

blurryleafphoto

It was a beautiful day to drive through the bucolic Oregon countryside. We saw Mt. Hood showing itself in all different directions.

mtHoodjan15

My goal for tomorrow is to do some more work in the studio and quilt my January EB piece.

 

This and That

Friday, January 16th, 2015

headfacedrawing

This week at the drawing class, we reviewed drawing 3-D objects and then focused on drawing the human figure. The head that I have here is the last drawing of the night and I did not have time to “flesh”it out.We started with a sphere with a protuberance for the chin. We learned how to divide up the sphere to get the correct location for eyes, nose and mouth.  I only took a couple of photos because I was busy doing the drawing.

Here us the body in movement that I did. I quite love this. If you look closely, you can see how it was made up from a series of cylinders that were then fleshed out to become this lovely dancer.

torsodrawing

Not sure how I will use this newly gained knowledge, but I am enjoying the process. It is the journey, not the destination, right?

Yesterday, I went back to Trinity to help clean and organize the studio with the kiln. Half of the space was taken away for a nursery bathroom. We are not going to have much space to have classes there, but at least we hope to get the kiln up and working and have a space for doing wet work for a few folks. I am going to use the space to create the large pieces of fabric for my solo show.

I have a load of stuff to donate to SCRAP today. We found this antique printing press for which we would like to find a new home.

oldprintpress

I found a better photo online:

afdae534227720052982f8c580157ac8

It is a big heavy thing. If you are in the Portland area and would like to take this off our hands, let me know.

Using Geometry to Draw

Thursday, January 8th, 2015

drawaface

I started the month long drawing class at Trinity last night. Randall, our teacher, is a classically trained oil painter. He is teaching us to draw in the old classical method used back in the Renaissance. It went out favor in the early 1900’s , I think. I took a drawing course at Cornell and it was not this method, more the contour method, I think.

Randall started us out drawing basic geometric shapes and then turning them in to 3-D shapes. I was a bit perplexed at this point. OK – all you artists who have gone to art school are probably thinking how naive is she!

Then, he showed us how to look at animals and human bodies and see geometry. We began by drawing cubes which we turned into faces. We did not spend a lot of time on each drawing – he kept moving us forward.

cubedfaces

We moved on to drawing dogs. We used spheres and cones.

 

conedog

dogshapes

dogdrawing

Then, we were given photos of dogs and piece of tracing paper. We traced the geometric shapes from the dog and then drew those on our drawing paper and with the charcoal added details to create a dog that was supposed to look like the photo. I really love the dog that I drew.

drawadog

Then, we moved on to body parts, starting with arms and legs. These started as cones.

armgeometry

geometriclegs

Then, we did a body in motion that blew my mind.

bodygeometry

I had so much fun. Can’t wait to go back next week.