Compositional studies 32-50

If you missed the first batch of studies it's Here.

Here's the next batch.

I will do a LONG debriefing on this project once I'm done with the color studies (a project that may take some serious time) but I feel like I've learned a ton just from these composition studies and I'm eager to get to the color. 

Compositional studies 1-31

Hey folks. It's been a while hasn't it?

I was working on my own personal work trying to apply what I've learned but I was not growing at quite the speed I desired.

After hitting a solid bit of depression and then having to take a look at what I was doing wrong I decided to give myself a bit of a boot camp over the next several months. I figure, since it's been 3 years since I graduated and my skills are now about where I feel they SHOULD have been sometime around junior year of college (so in essence I'm feeling about 4 years behind where I would like to be but that's being eaten up fast). I'm going back to basics and putting in the serious work necessary to improve to the level I want.

To facilitate that I'm doing a little bit of Noah Bradley's Art camp coupled with my own notes on what I know needs to be done with my training. Lots of tutorials, lots of studying and lots of practice. I have a set schedule for my practicing that's broken up into multiple days and I work on different aspects of things on different days.

Not all of it's figure and while that was the original purpose of this blog, I see it now as more of an online sketchbook. Now some of the things I've done I can't show right now since my scanner is not operational right now. I'll show more digital stuff in interim but that means the posts won't be quite as rapid fire. Wednesday and Thursday though are master studies/fundamentals day and digital painting practice day respectively so today I have 31 of 50 black and white compositional studies to show.

Noah Bradley's art camp apparently has you do about 50 comp studies and 50 color studies in the first week (I'm guessing because I was challenged to do 100 by another artist I know who was doing the full camp.) And let me tell you something. Even though composition is one of my strong suits, I DEFINITELY learned a lot more about it today. I'm going to try to crank out the remaining 19 compositional studies and the 50 color studies tomorrow.

Again, these are master studies of other artists work for the purposes of studying composition. Some are good, some are TERRIBLE. You have been warned. Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

If you're interested in the video that deals with these from Noah's Art camp you can see the link to that video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQfF-P70V2Q

And on top of that, if you want to give it a try yourself, feel free and let me know. I'd like to know I'm not suffering alone.

Unit Two: The trunk

This unit is going to be a good bit longer than the skeletal unit was (though as I said, bits are going to show up from time to time). Without further ado let's jump right in. 

First one here... yeah this doesn't have a lot to do with the figure... or does it? Dun dun dun. Okay in all seriousness it does and it doesn't. Really I felt very tight when I started working one day and though that some perspective shapes might fix that. It does help with the body though because essentially what I'm trying to do is reaffirm my knowledge of how the body behaves with regards to perspective. Having a shape, say a rectangular prism, around the body helps to figure that out. 

Decided to play around with changing camera angle and what that does to examining the form. That sort of came off of the perspective shapes exercise earlier. Also gave me another opportunity to practice turning of the trunk. A couple are referenced from one of my books and one, the one with 'reference' written next to it is from the gesture drawing tool. however, several are me trying out some of what I've learned about the spine, torso and body movement so there are a few from imagination as well. 

Did another digital painting study of a female trunk. Once again the gesture drawing tool provided the model here. Don't think I succeeded as well as I'd like but once again I did learn something from it. 

Finally I've got two male trunk studies. Both were done relatively quickly and helped me decide on my next move. I definitely need to do some muscle studies for the front and back of the torso before moving forward. So that's what you'll see on the next episode of Go Figure. 

See you soon. 

Unit one: Skeleton and some digital stuff

Okay. Time for post two. Probably shouldn't burn through my material like this so fast but I've got a back log and I feel like this will help encourage me to keep working. Anyway, when I planned this blog I knew I'd need a plan to drive my self education. I created a plan to keep myself organized and learn to build my figures from the inside out.

Step one was working on the skeleton. The longer drawing at the end of the last post was me prepping mentally for that. Anyway... skeletons!

 While drawing the skeleton was fun it was a bit frustrating to discover I'd made it just a bit too tall. The average male is about 8 heads high and this ended up being 9. Gotta work on that. I found a great skeleton reference and spent some quality time studying that.

The overall plan here is to use this unit focused on skeletons to improve the overall knowledge of how the body twists, bends and moves in space. There will probably be several more skeleton gestures before moving on to the other units which focus on other skills and aspects of the body.

This one was a bit trickier and required a technique I picked up when I read Bridgman's life drawing in school. I'm expecting my own copy in the mail soon. 

Skeleton and then musculature on top of it studies. Fun times. I even went ahead and used some charcoal. I hate charcoal with a passion. You have no idea.

I felt I'd close out today with some digital studies I did as well. Again, these aren't all done on the same day. 

These last two are kind of special in a way. I have a hard time solving color and value problems at the same time. My brain just has difficulty with it. I know a couple other artists who struggle with it and so they're processes have evolved to compensate and we wall pretty much do the same thing. Do a value under painting layer and then work the color on top of it. I decided to push myself on these last two and try to solve the two problems at once. 

They came out okay. I'm not happy about them but as one of my old teachers is fond of pointing out I shouldn't ever really be 100% happy with anything I make. They're better than I've done in the past and that's the real goal here. I hope you enjoyed these. There will be more coming in time. 

Side note: Yes I know my hands are really rough and I'm thoroughly embarrassed by that fact. I like drawing hands and lately I just haven't been doing them well. There is an entire unit dedicated just to them and arms but it might need to be moved up in line. We shall see. 

Again, all figures are from the gesture drawing tool unless otherwise noted.