Figure Drawing with Jason
Over the course of this semester, we got the chance to do art with a life model in order to improve our traditional skills.
We did three main exercises that were both interesting and had some really cool results
Process Acrylic Painting
We did a short study in acrylic paint of a nude model. We were given full colour to work with which was challenging since acrylic paint is very hard to mix colours in since it drys a little darker than the colour you see while it's wet. It was really interesting to get to layer the paints and work from broader strokes to something slightly more detailed. I'll admit I struggled on the day and my end product wasn't as structured as I'd have liked and the colours are a little muddy but I still think it was an interesting process to go through.
We were asked to take a photo of our progress every seven or so minutes while painting and then make a gif showing exactly how our picture got built up. This mimics the pretty popular format online of showing process videos of your art which can be entertaining or educational.
Croquis Animation
Another interesting session was the class where we got to do croquis that could be the keyframes in a short animation. The Model was asked to do two sets of six, ten minute poses where she would look like she was moving from one pose to another.
This was a good exercise since we had to pay attention to limb placement, making sure the feet didn't jump around too much, making the figure the right size on each page and keeping a consistent level of finish on each piece. For the second one we ran out of time and only did five poses but it was still a good set of poses.
I used clip studio paint to make the final animations for this since it was easier to edit the images together in a drawing program than in an animation program and since clip studio pro allows for animations as long as 24 frames, it was the perfect place to make a looping gif with very little effort.
I especially like the twisting motion in this one
Sculpture
Building a 3d sculpture of our model out of plasticine was quite the experience.
We started out with a wire armature for the body, I chose a wire that was far too big so my sculpture ended up pretty oversized. It may have fallen down several times during the process.
After that is was a matter of building up forms over time. I started with some of the big masses and trying to get the curve of the model's spine since his pose was very s-shaped.
The final sculpture was pretty badly balanced and not very smoothed but I'm proud that it takes on the general shape of the model. If I got the chance to do it again I'd have brought some scrap paper or tinfoil to pad out the armature so I could mimic the model's body type without the sculpture being too heavy. I would also have put even more of the wire through the base so the sculpture would be both smaller and more stable.
