Week 3 - Brushes

This week we were making brushes out of drawings we've made. 

shapes/eyes

 hands/feet

 jagged/swirly

 wavy/straight

 messy/splatter

legs/arms

 stripes/spots

here are the resulting brushes:

 I like how the eyes have a kind of spiky/scaly effect. 

Then we were supposed to create a creature using these brushes. 

I've used mostly the eye brushes because with the right spacing they had a nice texture for some kind of reptile. 

I used some of the splatter brushes for the background to give it a bit of texture, but not too much so it wouldn't clash with the creature. 

I've used the eye brushes because as I've mentioned before, they have a spiky kind of effect. 

finished piece: 

 I've made another quick drawing using only one of the brushes. This version seems a bit more grounded in the background because I had more control over the position of it's front legs.

Week 4(2) - Experimental image making

First thing we did was make some texture papers with acrylics and charcoal, which we then used later. 

Drawing animals was a nice change, even though having more objects to draw is always a bit challenging.

This one was a continuous line drawing and even though the proportions aren't right and things overlap even when they shouldn't I like the overall look of it. I think I'm slowly learning to accept that some drawings are just not meant to be perfect.

The last drawing was very experimental. We used the textures we made before and used them in combination with dry media. I tried to find shapes in the textures that already resembled the shapes of the animals and use those instead of sketching the animals at some random place on the paper. I also found a part that looked a bit like hair outline so I used that too. I wasn't really sure what I was doing but the result is kind of good. 

Week 3(2) Independent study - atmospheric drawings

For homework we were supposed to make 4 drawings with scary or dramatic atmosphere. I didn't want to focus on details, but rather the overall atmosphere of the piece because what I think often makes things scary is an element of unknown and I wanted to achieve that by including as little detail as possible without making the drawings indecipherable. 

My first drawing is of a window at the cathedral. I'm not very happy with how it turned out, but I wanted to see what it would look like without smudging the charcoal.

The second drawing is a building I can see from my window. I wanted to try not smudging the charcoal one more time. It does have a bit of a grainy, blurry old photograph feel to it, but it wasn't the effect I was looking for.

The next one is the train bridge. I liked the reflection of the lamps on the wet ground and how the inside of the arcs is the only thing that is illuminated. 

The last one is just a street and some lamps. Again, I liked the reflections on the ground. Obviously, I could see the surrounding houses, but I thought it would look more dramatic if only the lamps alongside the road were visible.