PART FOUR – THE FIGURE AND THE HEAD – PROJECT 3 FORM

Exercise 1 BASIC SHAPES

I found drawing the body as axis lines and shapes very helpful and seemed to improve my image.  I was hindered in this exercise as the model was photographed (2D) so I couldn’t move around her for alternative views. Below is a screen shot of the website I was using.

Below shows the development of the drawing of shapes. Looking more closely at this drawing, compared with the image, I can see I should have dropped the line of the shoulder to a different angle. The far shoulder is at too steep an angle.

I annotated the image (below) to show the axis shapes and measuring unit (the chair)

59cm x 42cm white paper charcoal

Exercise 2 -ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS

Again, all the images below were taken from the website. Each model has many different photographs in many poses, so this was helpful to this task. I tried to use better defined tone and this is beginning to become a little easier. Though, the areas of tone do still look like stripes. I’m trying to do less outline and used tone as the main marks made – building the form from within – this seems to work better for the charcoal medium. To keep proportion while building tone does require some light margins to the body shapes to be made, using axis and shapes has proved very helpful. Trying to put a spot mark measure of where limbs ended also helps when limbs move away from the form central axis.

42cm x 59cm white paper charcoal

42cm x 59cm white paper charcoal

Exercise 3 – STANCE

Lines on the images below indicate where I think the body mass is placed with these models.

42cm x 59cm white paper charcoal

Exercise 4 – ENERGY

The on-line photographed models had some great energetic poses – taken mid flight. I enjoyed drawing these and purposefully ran the images off of the page to hint that the model wasn’t static, but was moving through the space. I dragged an eraser though the image to hint at the direction of movement. I also didn’t end lines, left gaps and blurred bits of the model to try and show they were not static. I quite liked this effect.

42cm x 59cm white paper charcoal

42cm x 59cm yellow paper charcoal