Life Drawing - Skeletons

I took two Life Drawing classes at EMU. Typically, we worked from models in the class, or had homework assignments to work on self-portrait drawings. But at the beginning of each semester, we had a different type of assignment - to find an anatomically correct image of a skeleton and a skull (from the front and from the side) online, and to copy that image in pencil. The professor was usually against working from any sort of picture (even our self portraits were required to be completed from looking in a mirror, rather than from a picture of ourselves), but made an exception for this assignment.

The goal of such an assignment is obvious - to familiarize ourselves with the underlying bone structure of the human body so that we could better learn the appropriate proportions of different body parts. We would then theoretically use this knowledge to better our "from-life" drawings in class. We were instructed to label the skeleton and skull with the proper anatomic terms.

Here are my drawings for this assignment, which I did with a 0.7mm size mechanical pencil on large 18"x24" white paper. (Both drawings are from 2007.)

When I took my second Life Drawing class in 2008, I repeated the assignment (though this time without the scientific labeling). Here is my side-view of a skull - this time done in charcoal rather than graphite pencil.

New Acrylic Paintings - Instagram Posts

I shared many of these photos in the last two blog posts, demonstrating how I made the designs for my six new in-progress paintings, and how I transferred those designs onto acrylic paper. But there are also some new pictures here of the start of the painting process for those first two 8"x10" paintings.

These are all pics I put up on Instagram in the last two weeks. They're in reverse chronological order (newest uploads first.)

I've gotten some great feedback on these, with quite a few "likes"! :)

Remember - if you want to see my newest stuff, follow me on Instagram (@afrownfe)! I often post pictures of my artwork there while I'm working on them, but don't get around to adding the photos and descriptions to my blog here until days (or weeks) later, once I have time to upload the photos and sort through them and write up an entry.

These paintings aren't done yet - I still have to add the darkest background color.

New Acrylic Paintings - Prep Work

Yesterday I showed how I made the compositions for my six acrylic paintings. Today, I will continue on that prep-before-painting journey by showing how I transferred the designs I'd perfected onto acrylic paper.

I used a pad of Strathmore acrylic paper that I'd found when reorganizing my studio - probably leftover paper from that 2D Design class I mentioned in yesterday's post. My other materials were a General's Woodless graphite pencil (woodless so that it would shade large areas better), a cotton round to help smear the graphite around, and a pen to trace my image.

(My apologies for the quality of these pictures. I was using my phone, and apparently it can't handle the flickering light of the fluorescent bulbs in my basement studio. I turned the photos to grayscale so the yellow stripes wouldn't be so distracting... but they're still pretty bad.)

First, I used the woodless graphite pencil to color the back of one of the composition printouts.

I smeared the graphite around with a cotton round until the whole back was covered nice and dark.

Then I taped the design (graphite side down) onto my acrylic paper, so that the papers wouldn't move around while I was tracing.

Then I simply traced over all of my lines again with a pen - the lines that divided between the three colors, and the lines of the pattern I'd added. The pressure of the pen pushes the graphite from the back down and transfers it over to the acrylic paper.

I then repeated this process for the other designs. For a design like my sunflower, where I knew there were areas that wouldn't have any lines that needed to be transferred to the acrylic paper, I didn't bother to waste graphite.

Here are the first two designs transferred onto the acrylic paper - the impatiens image and the sunflower image.

Since taking these photos, I've done a lot of work on these two acrylic paintings, adding a yellow-orange layer for the lightest parts of the design, a light-medium shade of blue for the mid-tones, and dark red-violet for the pattern. I still have to do the final color - which I think I will finish in a shade of blue-violet that is darker (so dark that perhaps it is almost black), so that it will not blend in too much with the red-violet pattern.

Once I finish these two 8"x10" paintings, I will follow these same steps to transfer the next two designs onto acrylic paper, and then the next two. In this way, I'll do all six paintings. I plan to use the same color scheme for all six, so that they could work together as a series or set. I think they'd look great all hanging together on a single wall. But I still have a lot of work to do on these little guys, and who knows...? Perhaps my plans will change as I go.