CDDA - Environment 3D mockup

I just finished work on a 3D model of a previous environment design I did a while back. I did this because it will help tremendously with the perspective of the scene as there are a lot of objects and many of them are round too which would further complicate drawing them. I also took the opportunity to make some plans for the lighting of the scene. My final scene may look a little different composition wise but it will be pretty similar. I also want to darken some areas as the scene is too bright, I wish to darken the back wall quite a bit and make lots of shadows in the scene too. This didn't take long either so I think making it will pay off in the long run.

CDDA - Life Drawing - Pastels

 This week in life drawing I used pastels. Having little to no experience with the medium, the exercises proved difficult but more rewarding than using my normal choice of pencil. We started off with 4 different 10 minute poses centered around a magic ball of sorts. As you can see with my top piece of art I struggled initially to get the lines I wanted but as you go down the page I become more comfortable with the pastels eventually ending with a picture with a range of shading which I was very happy with.

We repeated the task after this but with only 5 minutes per picture and we were told to try and use 2 different colours for light and dark. The action set was based around 2 small swords. The first image I did not have time to add any red but after this I managed to do the task and learnt a few things. First of all was to pick 2 colours which go together better than green and red which does not give a good image effect. As for the horse head, it was Halloween and our model wanted to get into the spirit of things.  

We ended with a 30 minute pose. I did this larger than most of my art on A3 paper. Again we were told to put a lot of emphasis on light and dark by using 2 different colours. I chose a dark blue for the shadow and a light yellow for highlights and feel that these go together a LOT better than green and red. The exercise was very interesting and I like the end result I had. I did the line work very quickly so I could get a good amount of time on the colours and this shows a little but it is worth it for the effect of the colours. I really like how all this came out in the end.

CDDA - Life drawing session 2

During my life drawing session this week we focused on learning new ways to get the correct proportions in an average human body. During the last sketch we focused more on shadows and putting someone in a scene but still focused on correct proportions. The first method we looked at was to simply draw a stickman of the model, showing lengths and angles of the limbs and locations of important body parts such as the hips. I used to use this method when I first started doing any artwork so it was very familiar to me and I still found it helpful during this session.

The other method we looked at was using 8 spaces to help create the body. These spaces were each the size of the human head as 8 heads is the same height as the whole body. Whilst helpful, I found that I didn't really enjoy this method as much as the stickman. Not that it didn't help me create the correct proportions, I just find other methods easier. 

The next picture shows 2 drawings of my model with incorrect proportions. This is because we did an exercise where we had to make certain spaces different sizes using the 8 heads method. This meant that certain areas of the body were stretched longer whilst some had less room. This was fun and shows how it could be used to create creatures or humans who are not perfectly average size.

My last picture was focusing on light and dark whilst putting someone in a scene. The lighting within the life drawing room could not be controlled this week so the lighting changed with the sky outside, sadly making realistic shading all over difficult. I enjoyed this exercise and found that putting someone in a scene can make it look better overall. It was also a good exercise in that I learnt a bit of how the human bodies structure looks between light and dark. 

This session did help me a lot even though we did not practice drawing with my preferred method of getting correct perspective (using a skeleton with joints, similar to the stickman). Putting the model in the scene was the most useful part of the session as it is something I have always struggled with and I now feel more confident towards future work.