Traditional Drawing - Week 1 Year 2

Week 1 - Line and Line Weight: Development of a still life with the use of line only

This week marked the first time I was actually able to produce a traditional piece in the game art studio and I have to say I enjoyed this process so much more than I ever expected. There is a massive jump in how fast I can produce work in studio vs at home, as I was able to finish this piece and have critique on it with the short window we had for the whole week. I really hope this continues for the rest of the year, as if it does I can see myself improving so much and it not taking up as much of my will power to sit and draw again! 

Visual References:

There were two still life's to choose from, however I could only see one and was a lot more interested in the pattern of this still life in particular. so, from where I was sat, I had this still life in front of me to breakdown:

Still Life reference from where I was seated

I also had some references on the blue boards that I used to adjust my style also since I had very limited experience with line drawings compared to rendered drawings, and this piece by Jack Cook in particular caught my eye. I then used the way he approached the contours of the fruit and the shape language used in areas like the shadows to inform my final piece:

Jack Cook, Year 2 - Still life, line drawing

Initial Thumbnail:

To start, we were tasked with translating the still life in front of us into a simple thumbnail sketch. The point of this was so that we could focus on composition before making a final commitment to a full rendered drawing - or in this case a full line weighted drawing. We have been given free reign this year to create pieces that are not always accurate to the reference, but instead have been compositionally adjusted to create a better piece and to build our creative judgement. 

Thumbnail Sketch (gridded lightly)

• I created a very small thumbnail in the corner of my page and plotted in the general shapes of the still life in front of me. I knew that I was going to morph the flowers to be a more manicured, vertical shape than the reference, and I wanted to focus on a diagonal composition line from the bottom left to top right. 
• After discussing it with Teo, she told me to go ahead and plot in the shapes of my final piece after moving the frame slightly up to give some vertical breathing room to the flowers and to squash the blank space below the onion. 
• I could fit my final piece on the same page vertically, since the shape of the piece was a slightly squashed vertical rectangle. I made sure that it was not square however since then I could make sure that the composition read clearer and filled the page more evenly.

Initial Sketch:

After having the thumbnail prepared, I made a very rudimentary grid to split the page. The fruit came very easily and they were simply shapes, however I struggled a bit with the vase's symmetry and getting a correct amount of detail into the flowers.

Initial transfer sketch using the grid

Sketch Showing original composition plan

After getting the basic composition down, I spoke again with Teo about how it was going and what I should focus on next:

1. We both agreed that the composition looked oddly empty with both a gap in the top left and bottom right, so I chose to add some extra elements to the bottom right overlapping with the vase to add a sense of depth to the scene.
2. The shape of the vase was fundamentally wrong; the structure of it was more bulbous at the bottom half and the symmetry was off making the vase look tilted. To fix this, I was shown a technique where you gently fold the page along the symmetry line to make a confirmed vertical line to then build the shape off of, so I focussed on these elements for my next iteration.
3. I had too consistent of a line weight on the right of the vase which also flattened it, so I focussed on varying that when I fixed the shape of the vase.
4. I could use line density in abstract shapes to construe shadows in my piece, similar to the piece Jack Cook did. It would help add form to the vase, and emphasise what I was already trying to do where I was putting heavier lines on the lower right faces of all the objects.
5. I also needed to extend the foliage in the vase to meet the fruit so my original diagonal composition line was seemingly uninterrupted

Acting on Critique:

From there, I acted on the critique and really focussed on defining all the forms in a believable way. It was quite a challenge to restrict myself from adding shading to this piece, and it can be seen because my lines are still quite feathery in places (like the onion shadow area). I think this piece would have been more successful if I was using a simple wooden pencil over a graphite stick, since I am very accustomed to shading with the sticks and the pencil would force me to just use lines that are harder to blend. I also will sharpen my sticks more for future pieces, as I used a sharpener late into this piece so a lot of my foundation work was quite blurry.

Adjusted Piece

Final Piece:

Finally, after receiving a comment that I should add another flower to the right hand side to balance out the flower locations, I arrived at my final piece:

Final Piece

Conclusion:

Overall I am very happy with my start to this year, and I can see a mountain of improvement over my first year piece of the same technique. I am really excited now by having the freedom to make decisions that make the piece look better overall over strict technical adherence, however I understand why that was necessary for last year since I can now apply those technical principles and experience to pieces where I can draw from my imagination (still using heavy reference of course). I think part of it really was the change in scenery and especially when drawing on paper getting critique in session weekly is a massive time saver, as it is a lot harder to undo mistakes in this format. I look forward to seeing how much I can improve over this year!