COLOR: Individual Still Life Arrangements

Last night the students made their own still life arrangements of three to five objects.
Kate took a limited amount of objects and repeated them throughout the composition creating rhythms of similar colors and shapes. The colors are electric and luminous like a video game. The objects and placement is also reminiscent of a game where the player wanders through a landscape of prizes and pitfalls.
Rachel's drawing has a very dramatic almost narrative quality. The light creeps across the floor pooling around the objects as if escaping from a cracked door. Notice how she has swapped the colors on the objects to unify the arrangement.

NEXT WEEK: LINEAR PERSPECTIVE (BRING RULERS AND YARD STICKS, PENCILS AND ERASERS)

TEXTURE:Still Life

Luke Mello

Yesterday the class continued addressing texture. A still life was arranged with objects of various local values and textures (i.e. wood, metal, organic). Students were allowed to use any medium and to render the still life in the style of their choosing.
Luke has rendered the still life in a traditional manner addressing the local values, categories of light as well as the individual textures of each object. The composition is well balanced with strong attention to the negative areas. Furthermore, the values are rich, rendered in a variety of additive and reductive techniques.

INK: The Subjective and Space

Amy Harris

Randall Little

Last Wednesday the class drew from a large still life arrangement. The objective was to employ a more subjective style and address the space.  Amy has focused on the contours with minimal hatching and stippling to render the surface of the objects and the background. Her attention to the space is frontal, stable and direct. Randall's drawing in contrast has more depth and dynamics because of the  diagonals and high contrasting values.

INK: Tondo Compositions

Crysta Maguire

Gretta Collaso

Martin Little

Last night the class made still life drawings within a circular format aka the "Tondo." The circular format creates a very focused and zoomed in appearance. The movement around the format is fluid in comparison to the abrupt turns of the standard rectangle or square. This creates for interesting contrasts against vertical and horizontal lines within the image. In addition, it forces the artist to make new considerations of the negative areas.

VALUE: Light and Dark Rhythms

Friday morning began with Value drawings addressing two objects. The objects of Beni's drawing (top) are well proportioned to the paper. The values are rich and the categories of light have been rendered fully contributing to the sense of light and form. In addition, the background is well thought out and provides atmosphere and environment.
The nondescript space of Electra's drawing has a dreamy, surreal quality. The objects are rendered with high contrast tonalities. Her handling of the materials is inventive and skillfully applied. Of particular note is her rendering of the glove. The highlight's and gray tones add to the character of the form.

 In the afternoon, the still life was expanded to five or more objects. Julianna's drawing at the top engages with three edges of the paper enclosing the negative space. The objects are well proportioned and three-dimensional. The line quality is particularly strong. Notice the "accenting" of the contours (thick and thin lines). The values are sparse unifying the objects with the space.
Ray's drawing in contrast has taken a very objective view of the forms and light. He too has enclosed the negative areas. The values are rich and the categories of light are skillfully rendered suggesting light and form as well as addressing the local values of each object. He has clearly illustrated the still life includes white objects, gray objects and black.

INDIA INK: Wash drawings

Eduardo Arango Lopez

Friday morning began with small scale drawings in wash. Eduardo's drawings are tonally rich exhibiting a broad range of wash and line techniques. The objects are heavy and ground.

Eduardo Arango Lopez

You Nara

In the afternoon the class made full sheet drawings from a large scale still life. Again, Eduardo created a powerful image rich with texture and value. His marks are fluid and expressive perfectly complementing the subject and adding an air of Old West.
You's drawing in contrast presents a ghostly vision of the still life with high key valued objects and  reserving the dark values for the negative space. The composition has been compartmentalized isolating and organizing the forms as though they were placed on a shelf in a curio shop.

INDIA INK: Large Scale Wash Drawings

Joe Mulcaire

Last night the class continued working with ink wash. The large still life was rendered on full sheets of paper (18 x 24 in.). Joe's drawing above is very well composed. Bold rectangles and vertical stripes divide the top of the composition in the negative areas while smaller groupings of rectangles divide the lower portion. Although the drawing primarily exhibits a high key value range, it is still very complete.

MON. 4/1 Ink Drawings: Still Life

Forrest Lucero

Adriana Orozco

Students continued with drawing in India Ink. Forrest's drawing above relies on the contributions of both contour and tone together. The line quality is clean, confident and consistent throughout. Adriana has made a drawing exploring symbolic and invented textures. Each object has been given a texture that loosely interprets the actual surface of the object. Compositional balance is achieved by repeating the textures in multiple objects throughout the composition.