Halloween-Themed Drawing Project

So here's a special Halloween treat! Well, not really that special, what I'm working on just happens to coincide with Halloween. The current design project that I am doing for class is centered around a fall theme. We had to draw 10 "things" that had to do with a certain fall subject, so I drew a bunch of scarecrows and pumpkin heads/jack-o-lanterns. It was pretty fun. Here are the sketches that I did:

Here are the inked and scanned final images. I drew more than 10, but I either cut out or edited 6 of them for the final project. You'll get to see that later. Anyway, here are the inked drawings:

3 Value Still Life

For this assignment, I had to draw the same still-life as in my previous post, but this time I had to use 3 values: black, white, and gray. The same rules applied as far as finding a good composition based on the rule of thirds and the distribution of value.

I had to do the same process for this assignment too. One had to be in charcoal:

The other had to be made of cut paper. It was more challenging to do the black and gray cut-outs, because if the black shapes were glued on in a slightly off or crooked position, it would throw off the position and size of the gray cut-outs. As a result, this one took me much longer to do than the black cut-out piece from my previous post.

2 Value Still Life

So for this assignment we had to draw a still life in only 2 values, black and white. The key to this assignment was making a balanced composition. However, we now had two things to pay attention to. One was the rule of thirds. The other was the ratio of black to white and the way the black shapes lined up with each other. This is the composition I ultimately settled on.

First I had to draw out the composition in charcoal:

Then I had to make the same composition, except we had to use cut paper, in this case, black paper pasted on white paper:

Some Other Kinds of Drawings

In the last post I showed you some sketches we did during class. The purpose of those sketches was to practice pentimenti, which is basically a fancy word for sketching. The key to pentimenti is that you leave the construction lines that you used to get correct proportions and position in a drawing. Then you go over your final lines a bit darker. It's not supposed to look finished, so it looks pretty messy:

We also had to make a negative space drawing of whatever still-life we were doing, which you can see next. Smearing all that charcoal over the drawing to create a solid black was pretty messy business!

Sketches from Drawing Class

Here are some sketches that I did during drawing class. They were practice for larger projects that my teacher assigned for homework over the weekend. I'll be uploading those  finished projects next.

The Big 7"x7" Finale! It's a Pattern!

After creating all those textures from the last post, we had to pick one to make a pattern out of. We had to experiment in Photoshop with rotating, flipping, and sliding the 7"x7" squares around in a 4x6 grid. I tried a bunch of different possibilities, but I only picked two for my final designs (we could do one more for extra credit). Here they are:

7x7 Step 2

Remember how I said you weren't done seeing that 7x7 design? Well here it is again, but this time we had to add value into the white areas with micron pens. We also had to create a variety of textures with the value. Honestly, it wasn't my favorite project for a couple reasons. Number one is that creating value with micron pens is insanely tedious and time consuming, which is not the way I like to work. I also wasn't too crazy about the results. I wasn't really happy with any single design, but hey, I suppose I can't expect every project to come out the way that I want it too.

Final 7x7 Design

In my last post, I showed you the nonobjective contour sketches that I did. Here's the final project that came out of it:

This is the 7x7 square mounted on a 10x10 piece of bristol board. We were being graded not only on the design, but also on craftsmanship  so I spent a lot of time making the lines crisp and clean. Below is the same design, scanned into the computer, with some editing in Photoshop to increase the contrast.

Although this was counted as an individual project, you have not seen the end of this design. There are two more projects to come that use this as a building block, so expect to see more of it!

Update!

Hello everyone! I know the blog has been pretty dry the last couple of weeks due to mid-terms here at SCAD, but that's about to change. I've generated a lot of artwork since my last post so I'm hoping to start posting again by Monday. I'm hoping to keep a steady stream of posts going until the end of the quarter, which is around mid-November. After that, I'll figure out what to do while I'm on winter break. So keep checking the blog! Lots of good stuff to come :)