Paper Plane

Here's my third RISD drawing. I might put a little bit more work into it (pump up the contrast some)

So I took this photo with my new camera which has face recognition, and it actually recognized the face in the drawing!



Paper Planes

Camera

I try not to dwell on material possessions, but I got a new camera for Christmas, and I'm not going to lie, I'm in love. I take it everywhere with me (it fits nicely in my coat pocket) and take pictures constantly. Here are a few I took on Christmas day:



(my grandmother, my Dad, and my cousins)

Two Sided Drawing

So here is RISD drawing #2. The assignment was to make a drawing that utilizes both sides of the piece of paper. I thought this was a really interesting challenge and I had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for it. Actually I'm pretty sure I spent way more time thinking of ideas than actually drawing. There are a number of different approaches you could take for this assignment. First there is the time elapse. I had contemplated drawing myself on one side of the paper and drawing an elderly version of myself on the other side. Second there is the 180 degrees change in view. This tearing through the paper drawing is an example of that. I'd also thought about drawing a person wearing a hospital gown, from the front and from the back. And third there is the drawing that wraps around the paper. That idea never really appealed to me.

I would really love to see other people's drawings! They told us about one person who did a sketch of her drawing on the front side and the finished drawing on the back. I thought that was a pretty interesting idea. I guess it sort of fits into the time elapse category since it shows change or evolution from the front side to the back side. It's an interesting spin on it though because it directly addresses the process of drawing.

Speaking of process, I thought I would tell you all how I went about making this. If you've been to my house recently you've probably noticed that the doorway to the den is blocked by a gigantic piece of white paper and to get into the room you have to crawl through the three foot high gap at the bottom. This is pretty inconvenient. However, located directly at eye level (at least for me) is an exceedingly convenient hole through which you can peek in on a movie. My parents were watching sisterhood of the travelling pants 2 (hahahaah) and I just stood there watching them through the hole for a really long time. They didn't notice me until I started making sounds at them though.

So anyways if you haven't figured it out yet, to get the photo references for this drawing I taped a large piece of white paper up and then tore it to make a hole large enough for my head to fit through. I then had my Mom take a picture of me from the front and then crawl underneath the paper and take a picture from the back. It ended up taking a ridiculously long time to get the pictures taken. I'm thinking close to four hours largely because I like to be in complete control of my pieces and me being the model made that difficult. My Mom would take a bunch of pictures and then I would look at them and then change the lighting a little bit and then she would take some more and then I would change my expression some, and it went on and on like that. I'm really grateful for her for putting up with me and also for crawling back and forth over and over again. yeah..

Oh I also wanted to thank all of my friends who have come over and talked to me while I was drawing! Especially Abby who came and talked to me while I was drawing for two whole days, even after she was bored out of her mind the first time. Many good times were had listening to "Abigail, Belle of Kilronan" by the Magnetic Fields on repeat. By the way that song is now the number two most played song on my ipod (number 1 is Say Yes of course).

The Bicycle

I think I spent close to twenty hours on this drawing. I definitely could keep on going, there are a lot of parts that seem unfinished to me. On the other hand, it might be a good idea to move on to the other assignments.

Self-Portraits

All artists know that the most convenient model you have is yourself. In high school I actually got in trouble for drawing myself too often. Every day I would plop down and start a new self-portrait. Not too much planning was involved, I would usually put the mirror in my lap, stare down at it and start drawing. I haven't done too many self-portraits since high school...actually I'm fairly certain that these two that I did today and yesterday were the first I've done from life since high school.





Drawing yourself is a pretty strange experience. I'm probably not going to describe this well enough for you to understand, but I'll try. It's almost as if your mind separates itself from your body. When I'm drawing or painting I kind of go into a floaty state in which sense of time disappears and I become wholly unaware of everything except the figure and my drawing. So when I'm doing a self-portrait, weirdly enough I find myself forgetting that I'm drawing me. I guess at a deep level I always know that it's me but when I'm lost in my drawing I do forget.






Today I reached out a pencil to measure the angle of my hairline and was initially surprised to see the pencil appear in the mirror...I guess I'd forgotten that there was a mirror there. And when the direction and tilt of the face that I was drawing changed I initially got frustrated at the model..and then realized that it was me. I wonder if every artist experiences this disconnect or if it's just me.









Here are the two recent portraits:



meh..I guess the black and white looks the most like me (even though, as my Dad said, it also looks sort of like an Indian chief) but I really like the color one a lot better. Strangely it doesn't look anything like me.

Into the Wild

Well I have no new art updates to share. I'm still working on Carleton Confidential and I hope to have it finished by tomorrow. I did watch a really good movie today though.

No..not Twilight. I saw that too, but it wasn't too impressive. The movie you all need to go out and rent right now is Into the Wild. It'll change how you look at the world.

It's winter break and I'm just warming up

Hey folks. This is the start of what I hope will be an ongoing art journal.

There is so much that I would like to do this winter break. Maybe I'm being too ambitious, or overly optimistic, but I hope to learn how to silkscreen, make my website using flash, and begin to learn Illustrator. And of course I want to continue drawing and painting. During these next few weeks I'm really going to work on moving my drawing in an new direction. Rather than doing simple observational pieces that usually depict a single figure, I want to start doing more planned out, complex compositions with multiple figures. So far I've been able to convey moods in my pieces, but I would really like to create narratives.

Okay, so that's where I want to go eventually, but just to get myself back in the groove of drawing (I'm pretty out of practice) yesterday I did a few drawings of my cousin Abby. Hopefully you can tell that all three are of the same person. The small one with the dark background is actually from about a year ago. I thought it might be interesting to look at all three of them together.

Um on a somewhat related note I'm going to the National Portfolio Day at the Corcoran on Saturday and the idea of having my work judged is kind of scary. I think I may get in trouble for having too many portraits. On the up side, though, they may have some advice that could really help me!

Well that's all for now. Thanks for reading and please comment! I would love to hear suggestions for improving the Abby drawings!

-Erica