In-Depth Blog Post #2

In-Depth Blog Post #2

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my second In-Depth blog post so far! Some things have changed since my first blog post, well, a lot of things.  

Progress:

First, I have found a mentor! Yay! After I had a really hard time trying to email a bunch of artists online who either didn’t respond or said no, I found one. Turns out Ms. Croft, the grade 9 visual arts teacher, was nice enough to offer to mentor me. Props to her.
Second, I’ve created the Instagram account, I’ve met my posting schedule so far, which has been good. I’m sitting on 15 followers so far. Which I’m pretty proud of to be honest. I would say that part of my In-Depth project is going well so far. 

So, to go more In-Depth (get it?) my progress has been steady and good. I’ve been drawing close to everyday. Though lately I’ve been needing more time to do homework, etc. But mostly I’ve sketching faces, gestures and poses. Focusing on getting a pencil in hand for 30 minutes – 1 hour each of those days. I think I am improving, but I’ve been mainly doodling instead of doing any real studies. If I start doing more art studies, it will help my art. 

And as I said in my last blog post, I recently started digital art, and I spent a lot of time drawing digitally recently. I’m still trying to learn all the drawing software in Krita, specifically blending, which has been super confusing. Other than that, I think I’ve mastered all the basics. For our final social’s project, I decided to recreate a painting digitally, and I think it turned out well with someone of my caliber. 

– The recreation:


(recreation of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps)

To sum all of that up, my digital and traditional character drawing journey is going swimmingly so far, and I’ve been mostly on track with the goal of drawing every day. But I need to do more studies. 

There’s one issue I’ve been running into lately however, and that’s that I can’t seem to find a consistent art style that I would be happy with. I know this is just one of many artist phases. And plus, experimenting with different art styles is always fun. I’m aiming for a semi-realistic art style. Something similar to the styles of my favourite artists. 

My mentor and How to Have a Beautiful Mind:

Time to talk about my first mentor meeting! Our first meeting was fairly quick. It was mainly focused on making a schedule and setting down a basis for the rest of our meetings instead of the regular lesson. During this meeting we decided on meeting twice each month, once in class and the other online. We also discussed anything I would need to do before each meeting, and we came up with a few quick gesture and facial studies as homework to do.  

I was able to incorporate the first three aspects of How to Have a Beautiful Mind into my first mentor talk by doing the following: 

I was able to agree with most of what my mentor was talking about, such as what our goals as mentor and mentee would be throughout In-Depth, and we were able to come to an agreement when it came to the homework I was being given. Ms. Croft wanted me to do gesture drawing before our first class, but I also wanted to drawing some faces, so we came to a compromise and decided to do a full body study. I tried to avoid the “agree with everything” during our meeting, so I created a discussion and decided to build of my mentor’s ideas instead of just agreeing right away. My mentor was also talking about how she couldn’t meet with me outside of school hours. I saw her logic bubble and her circumstances regarding this, and I was able to agree with her decision. 

Disagreeing with my mentor will be a bit challenging, since there was really nothing to disagree with throughout our first meeting, and probably very little during the rest (which is a good thing). Though I’m sure that a few small disagreements will come up during future meetings. The most common disagreement I could see is “This is right for you but not so much for me”. In which I would first try to see where my mentor was coming from, and see if there was an opportunity to compromise or agree on the argument. If not, I would state why I am disagreeing and suggest a solution/try to explain my point of view. I know that my mentor knows much more things than I do, so I’ll respect that. 

Differing with my mentor however might be a bit more common, art is a super wide topic, and we might have different views when it comes to style and our own ways of approaching art. So, I can confidently say there will be quite a bit of differing in later meetings. In our first meeting, we differed on our plans for this ongoing project, but I ended up agreeing with hers since I found her opinion to be more solid and practical. In future meetings I’ll be more open in voicing my opinions so we can discuss accordingly. Try our best to reconcile and find a way that is comfortable for both of us. 

Thanks for tuning in,
Justin. 

 

 

 

 

 

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