Progress on the Lucian Freud reproduction, first posted about here.

Apart from just doing more shading, I’ve moved his eyes down a bit.

Alright, so time for an explanation.

In late July I was challenged to a blog-war. Blog-off. Blogfest. Blagofest even. The challenge was for each blogger to set a posting rate for themselves and to commit to it for the month of Blaugust. Uh, August.

Most of you probably know this already because you likely follow my comrades and rivals. You can find these fiends at the following places:

Leaflocker, home of the curious Thom, instigator of this blog challenge. Head here for all your miscellanea needs.
Telling Stories, John’s writing blog.
Jp’s Lab, James P’s blog that we’re all surprised is updating at all, considering he was somewhat reluctantly roped into the challenge. Primarily a coding hub.
M Dev Blog, The volatile blog of James F. We all wait with baited breath to see if this fascinating swirl of words and ideas will remain standing until the end of the month.

My commitment is to provide three posts per week of hopefully art things. Readers may even be graced with bonus updates from a guest poster. ie, someone that I couldn’t convince to start a blog, but did feel that a once-weekly commitment to do stuff sounded like a good challenge. While we’re on the topic, if you’d like to start a blog or website and lack hosting space, a) that’s a pretty lame excuse and b) I’d be happy to take on more people under the ‘chenonetta’ umbrella, provided you don’t find the domain name too silly. Let me know and we’ll discuss your needs.

Right, “Where’s the art,” you say? Here it is!

Homework for my life drawing class. We were to take a piece of cloth, like a dishcloth or something and twist it up. The aim is to portray the surfaces of the object using contour lines. Think of topographical lines or a wire frame model. I found it helpful to imagine a grid design printed on the dishcloth that I had to draw.

My first attempts are hurried and shaky. I can kinda follow the idea in the trailing ends of the cloth but lose the rhythm along the twists of cloth where I’m unsure about whether to be following the folds and curls or to try to simplify the mass into a simple sausage shape.

My last few are a bit better, probably also because I slowed down and thought about the problem a bit more. I’m quite pleased with the progress shown between the first attempts and the last ones.

Until I blog again,
Ale

Last week’s homework was to create two images that were hybrids of two objects that were randomly assigned to us. Each image needed to have one of the objects stand out as more dominant than the other.

Here are my attempts. Can you tell what the objects are, and which is supposed to be the dominant one in each image?

Does this one give things away too much?

Some things I’ve learned about depicting objects using tone:

• Work from light to dark, covering the whole image with each layer of tone.
• Use circular movements to apply pencil strokes, so that the direction of the strokes don’t interfere with the shading.
• The human brain is capable of filling in lots of information. There’s no need to use a line to define an edge when the viewer can imagine it.
• Squint! Let the shapes blur into each other and then work out what the main tones throughout the piece are.

Here are my last three homework pieces, all focused on practising the correct application of tone:

A polystyrene ball and toilet paper roll. Glamorous stuff.

Quite a light application overall, but the shapes are still readable (though my camera might try to convince you otherwise). It was a bit light in the room when I did this one, but it might have been that I was using an HB pencil that resulted in the lightness.

Katamari, soap and mini-dish

Well, my prototype Katamari was an excellent matte white object to draw. Part of me wishes that I composed this differently, with all the objects stuck to the Katamari, but I think this turned out really well. The Katamari was described as a “mutant tennis ball” during last week’s homework review, and other than the soap appearing to tilt upwards a bit (I wasn’t able to erase the pesky lines in the back corner), I got a good response for this one.

Powerboards in charcoal

I like the composition in this one. It has a little more narrative than random objects put together. The plug caused me lots of troubles and the sockets were no walk in the park either! After taking this photo I tweaked the far left shadow and the shape of the top power block. Taking a step back from things really helps to point out errors and inconsistencies. I’m eagerly waiting to hear my art teacher’s critique tonight!

This semester I have been participating in an art course at the Adelaide Central School of Art. The course is focused on drawing accurately from life. This means lots of careful observation and measuring is involved when depicting subjects – it requires lots of patience!

Last week’s lesson was an introduction to drawing organic objects. We were given a pair of ram skulls to draw… with so much information to get onto the page I found it very tricky and didn’t get very far into the picture. The homework went a bit better, even if it did take me around four hours.

Three pairs of shoes

Shoes might not exactly be organic, but the interesting shapes presented lots of challenges. I had to resist drawing freehand and made sure to measure as much as possible. I might have fudged a few bits around the laces, though…

This week we’ve moved from line drawings to tone. Homework: Draw two matte white objects.