Mid-Term Madness

Reading week is next week, so that meant a ton of work was due. Thank god I didn't stress out as much considering the ton of work that was due plus an actual mid-term. So I'll attempt to go through what we did  but I may be missing some stuff because I forgot to take a picture of them and such.

Painting

We were supposed to do a watercolour painting "en plein air" (an outdoor painting). I decided to do the park nearby my place and I forgot to scan the final but took a picture instead. Either way, I'm not very proud of it and I see all the faults I made which I pointed out during critique.

I really don't like it. One reason is because it turned out too bright, barely any dark colours. Second, the scene looks boring, but I thought the intersection of the paths was interesting from where I was sitting. I agree with my teacher saying that the paths draw our attention to nothing. And finally, it's not really something I don't like, much more along the lines of "this makes it look weird". I was sitting on a bench that's on a slope, which makes this look like the perspective is somewhere in the air, or "en plein air" harharhar. Sorry, bad pun. But yeah, I just don't like how it looks like I was floating.

Life Drawing

This was actually from 2 weeks ago, but there was turkey break so I had no class then. We had to hand in one geometric drawing, one contour and 2 gestures. The gestures were the two awesome ones I posted not too long ago. 

This one is the geometric. I don't really like it, I had a better one, but unfortunately I framed that one wrong so one leg went off the page. But that one was better, I had to settle for this one to hand in. I like the arm on the leg on this one though, it foreshortens a bit which was pretty cool to do for this kind of drawing.

Contour drawing, I had 2 awful attempts until I got this decent looking one. I just hate his left hand, everything else is really fine. But I got an awesome mark on this project/portfolio#1.

This one's from extra life after eavesdropping on a friend's tutor and had a revelation. I He was taught how to properly hold the conte and it changed how I drew so much. Unfortunately, this was 1/2 good drawings out of a whole pad. I have some good ones in a pad that's not complete yet, once it is I'll post them.

Our current project is pretty fun, and I hope I get a good version for one of the drawings before it's due, and the other kind of drawing is absolutely fun to do. It's a kind of gesture drawing that I'm really enjoying.

2D

We had to create stamps that represented Canada without using cliches. I had a bunch of ideas like Alexander Graham Bell, Tommy Douglas and insulin. But the phones were pretty boring in a composition, (sadly) Tommy Douglas isn't that recognizable so there aren't many photos to choose from (SERIOUSLY?! WTF CANADA. Tommy Douglas is a hero) and insulin as a stamp would have looked like I was promoting drugs. So I settled for coins when she said we needed a different version or a series after making the main design. I thought a coin series would have been awesome with the colourful gradient background a la Glee posters.

ToonieStamp

Stamp Variations and Small

The first is my main design of the toonie, and the second file is of the series and how my stamp would look smaller considering it's a stamp. I did a ton of changes for each coin it was getting annoying. At first I had all the coins similar size as each other in terms of how much of the page it was taking up. But it just didn't feel right. I thought that we're so used to seeing these coins that not only do we differentiate them by colour and design, but size as well. So I had to resize each one (a ton of times) proportionate to the other coins in each stamp. Then it just worked, it's recognizable and easily distinguishable.

We then had to mount it on a 10x15 board for critiquing. I felt like a pro after meticulously placing the prints evenly on the page. It's like I was about to pitch a stamp design to a client. I just noticed now how that is part of VCA (arts and how it can connect to business) and now I understand even more as to why we mounted them...

******

Anyway, that's what I have at the moment. I still have one final project to do for Friday, and I've been drawing a ton from life since we need 10 interior drawings with minimum 5 people for life drawing. We all thought it was due on monday, but it's actually for the week after reading week (we were all freaking out). At least I got 10 drawings, I'll draw some more (maybe 10 more because I actually want to do more) and post my final ones before handing it in. I'm finally getting used to drawing people in public places.