November 2016 – Courage

Lesson 14: FINALS

This is the final product of my drawing.

Scanned Version –

Photographed Version –

As you can see the focal point of this picture are more of the olden times where people are playing outside, playing with soccer balls or catching etc. And on the left side you can see that there are many people outside while on the right there’s only one person outside and he is using the phone. My composition is to bring across nostalgia. Why block 105? It is because I used to live at Block 105 in Potong Pasir and Macdonalds was the place i used to go ever so often last time. I’ve also tried to integrate modern looking building into the composition.

The kind of techniques that I used here are the asymmetrical balance. I try to include a little tone in my picture as there’s definitely sun and it was cast some shadow on the ground.

Since this is a one point perspective drawing. The drawings closer to the front will be bigger than those that are at the back of the road as you can see from my drawing.

This concludes this module and I have learnt a lot of new techniques that I will be able to use in the future.

Lesson 13: Prep work for Finals

The time has come for us to prepare for the final work that we’ve all been looking forward to.

My original idea was to draw old and new chinatown in a piece as in transition from the old to new from left to right. After much consideration, I realised that it will be pretty bland to do it that way. I still want to make the idea of an old and new concept therefore I tried to think of other ways to bring that across.

The basic idea of my concept is that: I am thinking about my childhood where as a child there were so many children and such playing outside, at the void decks, at the playground, at the badminton court, in school. Whereas, as compared to now, all I see are children on their phones and ipads, watching cartoons or playing games. It is really sad to see how technology evolved and made the children of the new generation this way. Missing out on all the things that could be done outside the house.

This was my idea after thinking for a while. A road that stretches and two sides of a street. The old side is on the left and the new side is on the right. It is joined by a pedestrian crossing that symbolizes the connection of the old and new.

I showed my this rough sketch of the road to the prof and he said that the vanishing point of the road is a little bit too high. So why not bring it down a little? So I went to look up on some cityscapes that are from street view and I got my inspiration from this picture.

I then though of things that needed to be on the street which are lamppost and traffic lights.

I then tried to draw out a few of it.

I drew it from different angles because my drawing might change and the angle will be different.

I included them into the sketch and this is how it looks like.

Drew it twice. One with a wider road than the other. I wasn’t too happy with the outcome. I still feel like something is missing from the sketch.

I decided to move the vanishing point lower.

I changed the road to be a little winding as my lines in the previous few sketches were rigid and it is boring.

I then build up the buildings that are supposed to be at the both sides of the roads.

So far so good? I’ve included the lamppost and some random buildings on one side of the street. I do away with the pedestrian crossing as I figured that it wasn’t really that important. Also, I changed my idea of being half old half new and integrate the old and new together in my composition. This is so that my final piece do not look so boring and very clear division of what is old and new.

I’ve included old chairs that can be commonly found in void decks and modern kind of tables like bar tables and those with a umbrella shelter on top of them.

I did not want to do so many imaginary buildings and I want to bring some childhood memories feels in my final drawing. So, I went back to my old hometown in Potong Pasir and took a few photos of the block that I used to live in and integrate it into my final composition.

I have to include the ‘old’ and ‘new’ in my picture. And those are depicted with people playing catching and soccer so very often in my childhood while now people are always on their phone. I got some of my friends to model for me.

My attempt at drawing them.

I used people my age because I was thinking, people in my childhood are my age right now. I initially wanted to use kids playing to depict my childhood but I thought that using people my age will be better because as the technology evolves, the people that grew with it also had the habit of looking at our phones or being immerse with our gadgets. I want to see more people our age going out and doing stuff that we used to do when we were young.

These are my prep for the final! The finished product is in the next post.

Lesson 12: Reflection

It is nearing the end of this module. Today, prof showed us a set of powerpoint slide that discusses the different kind of principle of a composition.

It was really insightful and helped me to put together pieces of puzzle in my mind that might help me in my final piece. Things like symmetrical, asymmetrical. Or the use of contrast and focal points. There are so many principles that were introduced to us in this lesson and in order to find the perfect balance for our final piece, we have to think through properly of the placement of objects and figures such that it will look like a complete piece.

How one sees your artwork. How their eyes move through your art piece. Do they see your whole picture. Does it keep their eyes in the picture instead of getting bored. All these questions I asked myself while doing my final art.

We did a little consultation with the prof and then off we go to do our final artpiece.

Lesson 10/11: Tonality

We were finally introduced to this thing called tones! A really interesting topic that is included in most drawings.

We have a model to come in once again and we used chinese brushes and ink for this exercise.

For the first four frames, we were just getting used to it. We were asked to focus on the parts that are dark or light. Depending on what you want to draw then you darken the parts you want to darken.

Prof warned us not to leave so much of the frame white but I just didn’t know how to do it in some frames. Even if it is not a proper drawing, you can roughly see the action of what the model is doing which is quite astonishing.

We then started to use charcoal instead.

Some frames were zoomed in on a certain body part while some is the full body.

For out final exercise of the day, we were ask to use tonality for a full frame drawing. This was the outcome:

While including stuff in the background, I tried to bring out the light parts as well as darken the parts that were almost pitch dark. I do away with the facial features as that isn’t the focus point.

It was definitely an interesting lesson today and this technique can be used for the final drawing.

Lesson/Homework 9: Night Drawing

Time to get out of class! We went out of class today just right outside the ADM building to do some drawing of landscapes.

We were asked to draw 4 landscapes that conveys the same emotion.

These are the 4 landscapes that I chose.

The emotion that I wanted to bring across was actually ‘Mystery’. But I think I’ve failed completely in bringing across that. Initially I was absolutely clueless on what am I supposed to do.

After completing the drawings, it was night time and we were tasked to do a night drawing outside ADM.

It was then we were introduced to pastel. White, Yellow, Orange, Brown. Different colours will bring across different feelings.

Colours was a new things to me as usual so I did not really use it to my advantage. I made places that weren’t supposed to be so bright bright. It was interesting to experience the use of colors and it makes the drawing more eye capturing in some sense.

For our homework, we were asked to draw 6 small frames of concept that we want to imply in our final drawing.

Frame 1 (top left): The idea behind it was that I wanted to have a half old half new kind of concept. Left half will be the old chinatown and the right half will be the existing chinatown. Transitioning from old to new.

Frame 2 (top right): A man using his phone. In this current generation everyone is on their phones.

Frame 3 (bottom left): The back view of a child playing marbles. That used to be my childhood and I had so much fun playing it.

Frame 4 (bottom right): Changed the layout from the transitioning of old to new chinatown to a two point perspective that transition. That frame consist of the ‘new’ part.

Frame 5 (second picture left): Lamppost. Need on the streets.

Frame 6 (second picture right): The old part of the scene. Includes shophouses where it was everywhere in the olden times.

Lesson/Homework 8: Portrait Drawing

We had the model to come in again to aid us in our drawing. We started out with an exercise. To capture the pose of the model as well as the objects in the foreground, background, everything.

There were more things to cover this time round and it was much more difficult than before. Getting the angle right is an issue, as well as the line of action again. This time round I can see that my line of action has improved as compared to before. You can roughly tell that he is sitting down and all that. Graphite was passed to us to darken the areas that were dark. It was my first time using graphite and I think I’ve darken the parts that are supposed to be dark a little too much while the rest of the picture remained white.

Prof noticed that the face was an issue in most people’s drawing so we moved on to do portraits of our classmates.

I drew one of my classmates and it turned out pretty well. Except for the fact that his face looks a little flat the way I drew it.

We then drew a portrait of the model.

I was pretty satisfied with my drawing of the model. Portraits was one of the favourite things that I like and it was pretty fun to actually do it.

For our homework, we were asked to draw 3 portraits.

I think I managed to capture their facial details quite good and you can also tell where they are looking at at the point when I am drawing them.

Lesson 7: Figure Drawing 3 (Form & Volume)

Our second excursion of the module! This time we made our way to the Dragon Kiln just right outside of NTU. I didn’t even know this place existed until that day. It was a pleasant experience except for the fact that there were so many mosquitoes there I went off itching all over.

The purpose of visiting Dragon Kiln was to do a clay structure of a model. It was, once again, my first time doing clay modelling and the experience was really new and exciting. The model was asked to pose for 3 hours while we do our thing.

This was taken half way while I was doing the clay modelling. We were asked to chunk everything. Make it big it doesn’t matter. Volume is what matters here. Making it look skinny and fragile is not what we want.

This is my final product of the clay modelling. I had to blend the chest area together because previously I made the chest looks like it is popping out and that is not what it is on the model. Therefore, I made some adjustments to the figure. The most difficult part for me are the legs. The angle has to be right and sometimes when I want to edit it the leg will just fall off.

After it was done we had to dig up the excess clay inside of the body and poke holes in it so as to not make the clay figure explode when it is sent to dry.

I wonder how my clay model looks like now.

Lesson/Homework 6: Figure Drawing 2 (Structure)

This week’s lesson we had our second nude model drawing. This time the model has a more defined body with muscle lines all over his body to really help us in our drawing of nude models.

For our first exercise, still life was incorporated into the composition this time and it includes the background too. Therefore, there’s more things to draw apart from the pose of the model.

I’ve tried using the technique taught to us in the previous lesson which is to get the angle of the hips and shoulders of the model correct and also his line of action. I still struggle a bit with the line of action part but I believe I was able to capture the line of action slightly better than before.

We went on to do some figure drawing. First we used the normal pencil, then we attached our pencil to a stick and did the extended arm drawing. This is to allow us to not be so rigid in our drawing holding the pencil the same way as always. It teaches me that there are other methods of bringing across a mark or a drawing.

Figure Drawing #1

Trying to get the body structure right is the first step in figure drawing. First I drew the angle of the shoulders and hips using the sight sizing method. Then I drew triangles to the middle of each line.

Figure Drawing #2

At this point we’ve extended our ‘arm’ out a little bit. That is why the drawing looks really light as it is difficult to apply pressure on the pencil when I am not holding on to the pencil.

Figure Drawing #3

In this, we extended our ‘arm’ out much more. It is difficult to control the pencil right now and the lines are going everywhere at this point of time. But still trying to capture the gesture of the model.

Figure Drawing #4

The pencil is now swapped with a charcoal. It was my first time using the charcoal. I’ve heard of it before from my art friends previously and it’s cool to be actually trying it out.

We did the extended arm on the charcoal that is why the drawing is darker than previous but still pretty light.

Figure Drawing #5

Different poses one after another. This time I’ve included the body lines on his back and body.

Figure Drawing #6

A new method was taught and it was, to draw a cylinder shape for the top body and a underwear like cylinder shape for the hips area. This is to aid us in making the figure look more realistic and proper.

Figure Drawing #7 & #8

This concludes today’s lesson. It was pretty interesting the things that I’ve learnt today. I have a better understanding on how to draw a figure better. With practice I believe I will get better in it.

On to the homework, we were asked to do two drawings. A 3D drawing of cubes and a 3D drawing of cylinders.

I really love to look at 3D drawings because it looks really realistic and it is like I am looking at the object in real life at a certain angle.

Drawing the boxes in 3D wasn’t much of a problem. I got the hold of it after a few tries.

The cylinder was a little bit of a problem. I don’t really like to draw curve shapes as that is my weak point. Some of the cylinders are off shape but this homework really helped me look at things from a different perspective.

Lesson/Homework 5: Figure Drawing 1 (Line of Action)

Surprise surprise! For this lesson, we had a model come in for us to draw. Nude model to be exact. It was the first I am drawing a nude person live and it was a really interesting experience as being nude allows us to see the lines and angles of the model better rather than the model having clothes. So why not give in a shot I mean we are already in this class.

No photos of the nude model of course. We started out by drawing stick figures as it was our first time drawing humans and it is a pretty tough job to be honest.

Different poses were posed by the model and we only had I think 2-3 minutes or is it 1 min? To draw the figure and I was panicking a little because that was so little time to draw the whole figure! But I managed to do it anyway after a little practice. After that we started to draw the model as a whole instead of just stick figures.

I was really confused with what is the line of action is all about. I could not see the line of action properly and needed a little guidance as I did my figure drawings. As you can see I was trying to get the line of action right is all the poses but failing in some of it. Up till the end of the lesson I was still struggling to get it right and was pretty disappointed with myself but practice makes perfect right?

So for the homework we were asked to get someone to model for us and to draw out the figure and their line of action.

The angle of the shoulder and the hips must be right in order to bring out the line of action too! These are various poses that I drew in order to bring out the line of action.

Lesson/Homework 4: Perspective In Landscape

We finally get to step out of class for drawing YAY but on a Saturday. It is still good. Finally a place that is isn’t in a room and we have more things around us to take note of and to draw.

We met at bayfront MRT that day and made our way to Gardens by the Bay! It is a beautiful place in the day and night and ain’t I glad that we went there for our sort of excursion to draw! We were brought to a spot and we had to choose to draw whatever tree and make it the main focal point of our drawing. The spot I chose was this:

Pretty nice huh? The problem to me was the leaves on the tree. How do you bring out the leaves in the tree when it is so tiny. Advice given was to just use any lines/marks that you want to bring it out. Here is what I came up with:

Pardon the bear-ness of the tree. It is really difficult for me as this is my first time trying to draw a landscape filled with different things and putting it all into my drawing. I definitely left out a few things but I tried to include as many as I can. Sight sizing was used again in this drawing and it was really tiring but I was pretty satisfied with my drawing. At least I managed to capture the branches of the tree and also the leaves I used curved lines as it is really tiny and there’s so many leaves on it that you can’t expect me to draw out every single detail one by one. That will be tedious.

After the exercise, we were told to draw a tree for our homework. I then went to my house area and scouted for a tree to draw.

I know it is not much of a tree but this is the best that I can find around my block. It was horrifying though as I think about the amount of details in this spot alone but I decide to draw it anyway.

It was pretty difficult to make the tree that I am focusing on prominent. There I decide to fade out the trees around the tree that I am focusing on. As well as fading the things t hat are further away from me. To really bring out the tree that I am drawing.