Saya's Art Practice Blog

Things have been a bit disruptive this week. Every computer I own is currently broken and I'm currently on a sleeper train somewhere in Scotland XD

Week 3 began yesterday!

Here’s my reference cat. The blue lines are what I started out with. I was trying to deconstruct it, and understand the basic shapes that make up the cat.

Here I tried to lay out the shapes, rearranged so that the cat would be facing another way. I honestly thought this was an okay-ish foundation, I was even confident about what I was doing..

And then I outlined it. Yep, this is what was left when I tried to use my form as a foundation to draw a cat. Oh dear.

I did try to improve on it, I tried to identify things I thought looked weird, I felt like its torso was too short, and it’s belly hung too low, and it’s head was like squashed into it’s body. So I tried to fix those things

I must have tried like 5 different times to figure out where the legs should connect with the body. I just couldn't seem to visualize it at all :( 

In any case this concludes documenting week two. It’s clear I’m going to have to work on my form & construction skills a lot more in the future I think.

Today’s practices went from ‘oh god, what am I doing’ to ‘oh this looks okay-ish’ to ‘oh i squashed it’

Honestly I didn't want to upload the first one, but I want to document my biggest failures as well as successes in this blog.

What happened with the messed up head? To be honest I started my practice today without much thought other than make a cube and put a head in it. Not much good came of it!

I went on to watch some more form and construction videos. I watched one with a guy drawing a car, and tried to copy his style, where he drew a basic box and added in details. Mine came out considerably messier.

After a couple more I found a video of a guy drawing bodies and heads, I was kind of put off about copying him because he clearly knew anatomy and I didn't. But towards the end he showed how he could take a picture of an object, and draw it at another angle. I tried to also do that! The hammer came out well, but when I tried a more complicated shape I really struggled.

I know I didn't practice on Thursday, sorry. I had to work an extra day this week, plus my laptop screen sheered off

Here are the practices from Monday, if you didn't see the stream :)

Here I was practicing what I learnt about Construction from another one of Sycra’s videos.

 I learnt how drawing beans can be useful for making many shapes. You can draw the contours of the bean and use it as a reference when adding in details. I found I was able with a combination of angles and bean shapes, that I was able to make quite expressive body language and experimented with it a bit!

So, initially I was learning about form. One of the main things was about the shapes that the objects are made of, and learning to be able to draw ‘through’ the object, and see the object in 3D. 

I was not using references to draw these objects in the positions they are in, instead I constructed shapes like circles and boxes to help me think about the object in a 3D manner. I found it helped me to create much more realistic shapes!

I have to mention at this point, that I keep watching Sycra’s videos on Youtube whilst learning. He seems like a really good resource!

I did a couple more object copy style practices as well today. The beer one I tried to just draw in proportion by drawing the length of each line relative to the ones around it.The cup I did a mixture of both, although I ended up with a skewed handle x3c

I figured I should also note the tutorials I’m watching, in case other people would like to track my path for whatever reason!

I’ve watched these two videos from Sycra on Proportion that I am basing my work on so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luJh1ASyzB8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N87QWwQnml8