In Class: Relections

Evaluations and Reflections

Perspective

 This was the first of 3 perspective drawings created within Ryan Locke's practical sessions. The task involved drawing areas within or around the university as a measure of perspective skill in the class.

My perspective work is very poor. This piece was scrapped as soon as it began for the reason that ruins a lot of my perspective work: lack of forward planning. For this drawing I simply started with an object and drew the objects around it, attempting to "tie" them together as I went. This dependency on structures can result in well detailed work when the perspective "works out" but relying on luck or feeling a way through a drawing is not enough to guarantee a satisfactory result enough of the time.

This work is an improvement on the first as it had an element of planning before committing to drawing, however the need to tie objects together was still very much present in the process and because of that the scale of items became skewed, deviating from the real life objects in order to "fit".

This drawing was also scrapped quickly.

Progressing further, this image used a combination of the two previous methods. Starting with an object in the corner, in this case the monitor, and creating construction times from that. Under request from Ryan, rough shapes were sketched in very light lines before defining features were added in darker line. The perspective of the piece is still awry and the line work not very confident but it has shown progression from starting. As an artist there seems to be a strong urge to make things fit in the scene when they do not and this can skew perception of an object. This process also alludes to a fault present in many artist's work which is scale. Working bigger seems to be the natural inclination and confining a piece to a smaller section than the whole page seems counter intuitive, but when learning perspective it seems that learning to constrain oneself to guides and plans is nothing short of a must. To expand on the lessons learned in this piece it would appear that practice is the main element in gaining confidence in perspective. With additional research materials such as tutorials on technical drawing (such as Karl Gude's great tutoral found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=felys-u4nfk ), with 1 and 2 point perspective being a mandatory learn, coupled with observation and practice, the overall quality of perspective work should increase dramatically. Weaknesses of the drawing from a line standpoint would be the table in the bottom left corner, which is a prime example of lack of confidence in the piece. The open drawer just off centre to the right has major overlap in line, which in perspective / technical drawing must be avoided to maintain accuracy. The drawing is in no way a bad starting point from years without perspective work but does show that much work is needed to reach industry standard.

Perspective and Life Drawing

Drawn with paint markers, the brown adds a seasonal style to this piece which works well in it's favor from a creative standpoint. The area in which the piece was drawn is also seemingly recognisable from the image which speaks well for having captured the street's character. This was tested by showing the image to a range of people and having them guess where it was drawn, most managed to identify that it was indeed outside The Burgh coffee shop in Dundee City Centre. Capturing the people walking past was challenging as the field of vision was quite small being that it is a scene through a window. However, keeping the detail on the passers by works in the scenes favour by placing more emphasis on the area which adding accents of bus life. Important aspects of the scene were details on both the tree planters and the building on the opposite side of the street in detailing the scene correcting. The piece was created within a 15 minute period as a challenge, the goal of which I believe was achieved.  The anatomy of the passers by seems slightly off in the character by the rightmost tree which hinders the piece but is not overly noticeable. Overall I believe this to be a successful sketch of a scene as it is easily recognisable from the location in a short time frame.

Sketches created before the large Burgh coffee shop piece.

These drawings are cute but out of proportion, which in a way lends itself to the style but from a technical perspective is a trait of my own drawing that needs to be stamped out in the future.