This Was HORRID!! (23/05/11)

Well Journal, I telling yuh, de stress I does have to deal with some times seriously outrageous yuh know! Today we were supposed to start drawing using pen and ink, (I already know the look on your face… how in the world do you DRAW with a pen) it definitely wasn’t what we were taught when we were little. But no matter if I drew on a wall or on the TV with a PENCIL when I was 5 years old, today I was going to have to draw with a PEN! Well the first thing that you need to know is that a ballpoint pen and a mechanical pen are the best pens to use for ink drawings. This is simply because of the fact that they have free flowing ink and that is mainly what you want when drawing( imagine if yuh pen stick on yuh while yuh drawing yuh face… hard lucks for de fella that that happen to! Your face would probably come out looking like a shaky and blurred gorilla head). Miss asked us to bring a photo to school to draw, I brought my passport photo from when I was about 8 or 9 years old; little did I know that it was way too small. Miss told us that we had to grid our picture with the same amount of squares that we had on our sketchpad paper or to proportion (if I had 140 squares on my sketchpad paper I could either grid the picture into 70 squares or 280 squares but NOT into 71 squares).My sketchpad paper was gridded the night before and I now had to find a NEW photograph to use. Now as you’ve probably noticed (and if you haven’t then… WOW!) I didn’t actually start drawing anything today so really what I’m doing here is showing you guys the troubles that I faced and the ways that you might be able to avoid them. So I got a picture out of the school newspaper and began gridding that. Now the first thing that you want to do when gridding your picture is to know whether your downscaling it, enlarging it or putting the exact same number of squares. The last one is the easiest but that also depends on the size of the picture. So I tried doing this but I couldn’t get the exact proportion to enlarge it to, because the length was odd and the other was even. Also it was pretty hard to get the ratio correctly and find the right measurements on my ruler. What also really did not help me was the fact that my ruler is slightly bent and so my lines were being drawn slanted!! All in all, just remember what I’ve said here and know that I completely failed in my quest to grid my picture. Don’t worry the next journal entry will be all about what I did and how I drew the picture. So thank you for reading… and big balls!!(Just watched Wipe-out)

I CAN'T DRAW!! (pastel painting)

So today we began drawing a still life using pastel paints. Before you here about all of this important information Journal. Just remember… I CAN’T DRAW! I always feel the need to remind you of that just so whatever I say isn’t too surprising to you. I want to keep up with current events first. Remember that collage thing that I was telling you about? Well I completed it and named it The Setting Sun. Nice right, well I got 22 out of 25 for that one. Remember my still-life drawing? Well Miss checked that one and I got 17 out of 25 for that it. It was one big fail and you can see that for yourself. So now that we covered the recent events we can focus on today.

     Miss told us that there are two types of pastels, oil and chalk pastels. The one that I was to be working with was going to be chalk. She said that the best surface for working with pastels is a slightly rough surface to capture the particles and help the colours blend. She gave an example of this using a red and yellow chalk pastel. Just like she said the particles did blend to create orange but she also pointed out that there were some places in the shade where there was an optical illusion taking place, where one colour just covered the next to look like orange; it didn’t actually mix with it. Afterwards she did a quickie drawing to demonstrate how we should go about drawing our fruits. She mentioned that most all fruits have a hint of yellow in them so that would be our base colour. Afterwards she applied red to the yellow being careful to leave out the highlights. The shape of the apple was beginning to appear and she added hints of blue where there were supposed to be shadows mentioning also that it substituted black. After all of this I didn’t get enough time to finish my drawing in school so I have to finish it at home. You can see it right here actually. What do you think?

WARNING: Remember PLEASE that I don't have the ability to draw!!
For some reason I also get the feeling that oil pastels are really just crayon. They have the same type of application on paper even though the paper has been textured and the pastel collects in certain areas just like a child's drawing tool. Maybe oil pastel is just a fancy way of saying CRAYON.

Collage and Still- Life (it tasted great!)

Greetings once again my journal. Keeping to my promise that I made yesterday, I’m writing in you at the soonest chance that I got; after chemistry home-work and Spanish revision was finished. Today in art class we drew a still-life just as Miss had on the agenda. Before we actually go down to business Miss gave us the definition of collage and she also gave us a few tips to help us while making a collage.

Collage

A collage consists of using materials not usually associated with each other and sticking them onto a flat surface, to create a composition.

Here's my collage ( it's supposed to be a setting sun) just in case it wasn't clear

I thought that this was pretty hard to do if that is what it meant I had to do. It basically means that in a collage I should use pieces of pipe with pages from an old magazine; use materials totally in contrast from each other. Or at least that’s what I took it to mean.

Back to the still-life, I chose an apple as my still-life which surprisingly came as a challenge to draw. I really wasn’t expecting it to be so intricate but, as usual, that’s what drawing is about. We started at around 11:00 a.m. and Miss told us to stop drawing at 11:35 a.m.  Things to remember about drawing are to always discern where your light is coming from. Also when you are shading a circular object you should be mindful not to shade as straight lines bout rather in 360 degrees circles so as to not stray away from the true nature of the object and to give it a proper three-dimensional look. Another thing that Miss reminded us about was that when our outlines for our drawings are too dark and sharp looking we should soften them by lightly passing an eraser over the outline.


And this is my Still-life apple and like I said... it tasted great after I drew it.



Thursday 26th April (Back to Work)

Hello Journal. You know what I like to think about you and I. I hate you and you have absolutely no feelings for me… that kind of makes me your enemy but that also makes you my carefree non- opinionated friend. So in the end we’re friends I guess. I don’t really have much to talk about today seeing as this is the first Art class of Term 3. Miss gave us our agenda for the term. She told us about things like pen and ink drawings, still-life… oh! That was it; I forgot that we were pretty surprised in class when we found that out. I didn’t particularly like my performance last term so that’s why I’m planning to do everything early, on-time and with my best effort. Which is why everyday that I have art I’ll make sure to set aside some time to write in this journal on the same day; that is actually the important part about that plan. Not waiting for the closing of the term to write a whole journal seems like a positive way to start my plan of E.O.T.B.E.

Welcome to my work

Hello people, ladies gentlemen, boys, girls, animals, aliens. Whoever is reading this I say welcome. You are now reading my first blogpost on my blog which is named right above this post so I won't mention it (that's right, just direct your eyes upwards it's not that hard). Anyways the origin of this blog came as a result of my Art class in Hillview College becuase my teacher requested it. Hence if you see alot of journal entries at this site, at least you know why. I'm not very sure what will become of this blog when the term is over but for now. Enjoy it! Read about all the things that I do in art class and all the things that I've learnt and maybe you too might gather some kind of knowlege from my posts. So thank you for reading this far and if you like this post then... just keep going.