I have personally never had any art experience, other than sitting in my room or at my kitchen counter drawing pictures of dogs I found on the internet. My goal was to be able to draw people and faces better, which I feel I'm improving at. I came into the class feeling like I would be the worst, and while that may be true, there were many people at my skill level in the class learning along with me.i learned during the semester that it's important to draw what you see, not what you think you see.
It is very clear to see that at the beginning of the year, I didn't know how to draw things the way they were. This is my blind contour. I wasn't focused on how things really were, but how I thought they were. A contour is the outline of a drawing or the "dark lines" that outline the shape of what you're drawing. A blind contour is when you draw something without looking at it, only drawing the inside lines. We used blind contour lines to also draw our upside down drawings because we had to draw what we saw, not what we thought we saw.
I decided for my positive and negative space drawing that I would draw leaves, because it was fall at the time. I split my paper directly down the center so I could make it look as clean and precise as possible. The positive space is the left side because it shows details in the leaves, while the right side is the negative space because the background is all dark and the leaves are all solid white showing no detail.
This is my before and after hand drawing. I improved most on my contour lines and added lots more detail in the second drawing, which is the one on the left. I feel that the hand on the left looks a lot more realistic than my beginning drawing on the right.
For my profile drawing, I drew Joey. I tried to focus on the shape of his nose more than anything else, which effected the glasses and threw the drawing off a bit. For the most part, the drawing looks like my model.
For my stippling I chose to draw the shoes I was wearing that day. When stippling, you need to add more stippling marks (or dots) where the shadows are or where the colors are darker.
I believe the texture and contour and shading of the wooden figure looks really nice. It sets the mood for the entire drawing and makes it overall look more professional and pleasing. To me, that was the most successful part of this drawing.
For the most part, this drawing looked really realistic other than the harsh outline around the head and ears of the dog. I feel that the texture looks about right, similar to the picture, and is overall successful.
This drawing took a lot of measuring, which I may or may not have slacked off a bit on. It's important to make sure that everything lines up. And just because things appeared straight in this picture, in fact, none of the angles in this drawing are competently straight.
I was extremely successful on my shadows and highlights in the drawing on the left, which is my improved drawing. It looks a lot more realistic and a lot less like a fictional character from a movie, E.T.
I didn't have a very good outline of this drawing which effected everything negatively. My value was way off because it didn't line up with the actual image and looked sloppily done. However, my shadows were dark much like the picture and the effort was definitely there.
I was challenged to stay focused on the projects we were doing even though I had really good friends in the class and wanted to socialize. I also found it very difficult not to procrastinate and wait until the very last second to get my work done and do it nicely. I improved mostly on my drawings just by switching out one thing, my pencils. At the beginning of the year I drew everything with mechanical pencils and would always get yelled at, but then when I finally switched out my pencil everything started to blend nicer and things started to look a lot more put together,