In-Depth Blog Post #6 

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the final blog post for In-Depth, it’s been a wild ride everyone and I wish you guys the best. Stay strong y’all.  

Progress and what I’ve doing these past days: 

So, my learning during the past few days (or weeks) has been pretty stagnant unfortunately. I haven’t found too much time and motivation to draw recently. Even though I have been doodling often, and honestly, I haven’t been focusing on studying or improving. It feels more like art burnout than art block right now. I just need time to adjust myself. Though it’s obviously hard with things having deadlines. 100% I’ll start working diligently starting this week and beyond. This time I’ll be trying my best to draw a full body. I’m going to draw my heart out until In-Depth Night since I do believe I have been slacking a bit. 

And speaking of doodling, here’s one from this week: (and yes my camera is super bad I swear it looks better in person.): 

And an idea to tackle this art burnout is to just take an inevitable break from drawing people. Since that’s what I’ve doing for so long now. I’m thinking of digitally painting landscapes as well, even though it doesn’t relate much to character design, I think it’ll be a good refresher not only as a break, but to work on color theory, mapping, and brush strokes. Just switching things up from character design/ portraiture. Focusing solely on thing for so long ends in burnout.  

And as always, besides these doodles, my mentor gives me some small homework to loosen up my lines and to help me improve at proportions, gesture, etc. However, we ended up having our meeting together the day before this blog post was due. And I didn’t have time to finish working on the assignments, so unfortunately, I can’t show you the finished product, however, to give you an idea of what I was supposed to do, here are the criteria for the assignments that my mentor gave me: 

Spiral drawing: 

Gesture drawing: 

Light contour + spiral: 

And lastly, I’ve been brainstorming ideas for characters to create. I’m thinking of making my favorite songs into people, then drawing them a persona. I don’t know if that’s going to work out well, but I don’t know until I try it out! So, wish me luck.  

I wasn’t able to uphold my promises last blog post. But I’ll do my best to uphold them for this one. 

My Mentor! and How to Have a Beautiful Mind: 

Again, my mentor and I had a quick meeting in person socially distanced in the classroom. Here’s a quick summary of what happened at the meeting. My mentor wanted me to keep working on my contour line drawings, and to help me use more rounded lines. So, my mentor gave me a few examples of spiral drawings (as shown above in the criteria picture.) and some quick gesture drawing (one example is also above.) And, a quick example of another contour, but this time on top of an existing spiral drawing. She gave me the examples and asked me to draw my own drawings incorporating those 3 techniques on my own time, and that was about it! And even though these blog posts will soon be over, we are still planning to meet next week. 

So, what are some concepts my mentor brought up in our last meeting? And alternatives did my mentor give me during the past few weeks I’ve been working with her? 

A concept that my mentor brings up very often, almost in every sentence, is art, because of course my in-depth is drawing. Another concept that that my mentor brings up quite a lot, including our previous meeting, is lines. Lines are the concept behind drawing, and most of art as a whole. Lines create shape, which paint a picture, the practical idea. Another concept that my mentor brought to the table at the previous meeting is real-life. She wanted me to draw from real-life, not realism, but to have something in front of me to reference, instead of a photo or an image. Her reasoning behind this is that when you’re referencing a photo, you’re creating a 2d drawing from a 2d reference, but if you’re referencing a 3d object, you have more to work with, which is obviously better. 

Alternatives, my mentor was able to incorporate a lot of different alternatives throughout this project, a perfect one to showcase this is the homework she gave me this last meeting. Not only did she give me an assignment, but she made sure to add alternatives to the spiral drawing, such as choosing to add a contour drawing on top, and an alternative option of drawing a few gestures, or even combining the three. 

Since art is a very loose ended subject, which anyone can take on by doing anything, the topic of art offers thousands of alternatives, you draw what you want and draw it however you want. Alternatives In art can help build skill and a wider knowledge of art as a whole, this is because the more you do things differently, the more you learn, and the more you can incorporate what you learned into you art. Also alternate views can change how each person looks at art. My mentor gave me a lot of alternatives when it came to work and teaching, and even when critiquing my drawings. An example of this is whenever I hand back some homework, she tells me how I could do this thing differently. She tells me I could’ve drawn this nose differently to add character, or how I could exaggerate this person’s jawline, etc.  

My mentor also looked for alternatives to suite my ability and to suite my schedule too! Props to her. 

Another mentor could have offered me completely different alternatives. A mentor candidate that I had focused solely on digital art, so all my meetings may have been different as a whole, which would in turn lead to different offered alternatives. Others may have taken a completely different approach to art, which would also lead to completely different alternatives. Some might offer less and be more strict on art and its boundaries, some teachers will tell you that there’s only one way to do this, or that using references is bad, and they point you to alternatives such as memorization and such! (It isn’t don’t listen to them; references are key.) Others can be even more relaxed to the point that they don’t even care, which opens even more alternatives. 

Conclusion, each person will offer you different alternatives, so a different mentor means different alternatives. 

 

My Learning Center: 

Ideas since my knowledge of the in-depth learning center is sort of vague so far: 

• Explain why I chose this in-depth topic and what my inspirations were to start. 
• Live drawing session (this will be A LOT OF FUN I’m excited.) I can draw people that are visiting my learning center. 
• A virtual gallery showing off my art, and I can explain my reasoning behind each piece and my process. For this I could either just post a bunch of images on a document or website. But I could maybe also use something like Kunstmatrix. (https://www.kunstmatrix.com/en) 

• A tutorial on how to draw faces, gestures, proportions, etc. Talk about techniques and how anyone watching can become an artist. 
• We can have a scribble.io game (online guess the drawing.) Another *alternative*, or any type of interactive game/activity. 
• A Process video/time lapse. 

*These aren’t final, but I will be incorporating these potential ideas into my in-depth learning center! And I’ll probably think of a few more I can add as time goes on too.  

Thanks for reading!