Module 5: Technical Abilities, Creativity, and Understanding of Principles
Objectives
1) Practice gesture drawing and capture the model's weight.
2) Draw 20 five-minute poses from a recommended video.
3) Create a portfolio of your five best drawings and give constructive feedback to peers.
Technical Abilities and Creativity
In this module, you will spend a lot of time drawing the figure using the skills we learned previously. A few reminders:
- Start with a quick gesture drawing, you must capture the weight of the model! Is he leaning forward or backward?
- Pay attention to your mark-making and which direction your marks travel in
- Please don't worry about the details more than the form. At this point, the face is not important. You can draw the shadows below the browbone and the nose to draw the face.
Activity
Watch a video by New Master's Academy. I linked a certain video but any video will do; you can choose your model. Over a few days, please have completed 20 five-minute poses. This will help develop your skills greatly!
I also suggest that you watch this video before you get too far. He has great tips dealing with obtaining the curve of the body and where to place the hands.
Critique
We have explored critiquing before by commenting on one another's artworks. Here, I would like everyone to develop a portfolio and contribute more in-depth critiques.
Portfolio: "An art portfolio is a collection of projects which best represent an artist's work. Depending on the media used, a portfolio can include actual artwork, web links to artwork or photographic documentation of the artwork" (kingseducation.com)
You will create a small portfolio using the five best poses you have created during this course. How do you determine what are your "best" drawings?
- They best represent your current skill level
- They are visually interesting! Maybe the drawing has an interesting composition, where the eye moves around the paper. A lot of the time, this happens by chance.
- They show form and figure-ground relationship
Keep yourself organized by adding the photos of your drawings to a file on your computer. You can title them with the date they were created, or with something like "LastName_Figure_1." This will help you to differentiate. To participate in the critique, create an intial post in the discussion. Attach all five photos to your initial post. Also, write a paragraph about why you chose these drawings, what the process was like of creating these drawings, and summarize your overall experience in the course. Do you feel as though you made progress in your figure drawing? If so, where do you see the most progress?
Then, respond to two peers. Please give feedback based on everything you learned in this course. You can write about the quality of the gesture/ weight, the anatomy, the proportions, the mark-making, etc. You can also be more open-ended with your responses. You might find this resource from the Art of Education University helpful.