Kitty's Drawings

Hiiiiiii!!
Lightning fast posting tonight….Just a few sketches I did on the weekend from “The Figure in Motion”. Retro 70′s nudes FTW lol!!

Excuse the really dodgy heads and clumsy shading.

Should bring some colour back into this little blog huh?
ConceptArt is up to its 200th CHOW which involves a month long contest with the theme “Monarch of CHOW”. We have to a depict a king or queen of a particular music genre. TOO MUCH FREEDOM. Soooo many ideas! I should start sketching soon. Need to think about this one a lot.

You know I haven’t even done anything digital for a few weeks now? Feels strange.
Life drawing last night was fantastic too – if a little messy. Silly me to wear a white top on the day we’re meant to colour in our entire page with BLACK charcoal. Messy messy. Will attempt to somehow capture my drawings with the camera. Dreading the thought.
Okie then seeyas!!

Hiiii!
Gee haven’t I been slack? Two weeks into life drawing and I’m only posting now. And I never did find that memory card so I had to use another camera instead. This is why the photos are REALLY crappy. Seriously I’m ashamed at how bad they are. Should be taking them in daylight but it gets dark pretty early these days.
So this is gonna be a mega post with heaps of cruddy images. I’ll work on making them better for my next life drawing post.
We’ll start from the beginning and go from there. Click to make bigger – I’m trying to keep them smaller this time… Sorry I can’t be bothered formatting them so they look tidy either. Meh!




That was the first week. Notice the different techniques? We had to do some exercises like drawing without looking at the paper, drawing with our eyes shut, with our non-preferred hand and with a continuous line only. Tricky stuff! Oh and the one saying “Sorry” is when we had to rotate and finish other people’s drawings.
Onto this Monday:

Practicing negative space…

Really bad proportions….Yipes

Overall…I am loving the classes! They go for 2 hours and it’s just the right amount of time. My hands get filthy with charcoal and graphite. Awesome. And it’s all kind of freeing.
Oddly enough, out of all the people there it’s only me and my two buddies from ConceptArt that are using tone in our drawings at this stage. Which would be frustrating cos getting lines right with soft charcoal is a pain in the butt. All learning I guess. Ick these are pretty horrible drawings. It feels better to use really soft graphite over charcoal. And I need to get me some spray fixative.

Well I’m off to bed. I should be drawing more outside of life drawing. Slackie. This is invariably what happens when I pick up READING again. I have two books on the go right now so they’re taking up more of my time than they should. Naughty.

Night!

PS…and this is what happens when Puss wants in on the action….

What is it with cats and paper? She was diving under the sheets! Crazy kitty.

Hi Everyone!
Hope you’ve all been having a fantastic easter and not gorging on TOO many eggs! Hahahaa kidding, eat away – I can’t deny anyone the right to eat chocolate.
Things in our household have been typically non-traditional. No easter eggs here. I think I’m over chocolate in chocolate form. Unless it’s Koko Black of course. Everything else is too sweet. I am becoming more partial to things like icecream and cakes oh yeh. Yum!

We went to see Clash of the Titans in 3D – which was good. Well….No worse than I was expecting. Which wasn’t much. It wasn’t groundbreaking cinema….but nice for the Sam Worthington factor teehee. I think Avatar kind of ruined 3D movies for me at this point. Set the bar too high. There wasn’t much added to Clash of the Titans by wearing 3D glasses – Alice was the same. It would be more worth it for movies that are made entirely in 3D like that How to Train Your Dragon which is out now – or which use the same technology which Avatar did. So until everyone is making movies like they did with Avatar, I wouldn’t bother paying extra for the 3D screen.
I do like booking online though – No waiting in line with the plebs at Melbourne Central hahahaa.

Been watching a few other films at home. Most notable was The Wrestler – quite depressing but very very well made. Perfect role for Mickey Rourke. Also another surprising one called Pandorum. No idea where I found it but it’s great. A sci-fi flick set on a spaceship heading to a new planet found to possibly contain life, where things go wrong of course – their hyper-sleep schedule is messed up and they wake to a ship overrun by weird creatures. That want to kill them of course. Great tension and quite a few plot twists and a fantastic ending. I was very pleasantly surprised – as much as I love reading sci-fi, the movies can often suck pretty hard.

Well onto the drawing….This is what has been taking up my time – in the same style as the last one….Kind of don’t like it as much. Meh. But it’s okay I suppose

Okay then well I better start thinking of what to draw next. And get some food. Hungry.
Seeyas!

Hi!
Something I’m drawing is taking a little longer than expected. So in the meantime I’d thought I’d give everyone a heads up about a few changes around here.

I’ve changed my blog background a bit – a scan of my latest sketchbook which is a bit better looking than the last one. Also, I’ve updated my gallery with more recent work and performed a heavy edit. I’ll be adding back some of the graphic design work but some of those old illustrations had to go! I also found a fantastic WordPress plugin that makes the gallery a lot neater, cleaner looking and much easier to navigate. No need to hit the Back button all the time. Annoying!

Since it’s Easter and I’ll have a lot of time to do stuff, I’ll keep tweaking things and I’ll finish this drawing So until tomorrow, hope you’re having a good Fri(Thurs)day

This Sunday I finally caught up with the Melbourne Gra-Fight Club (cool name) – the weekly sketch meet with the peeps from ConceptArt.org (from here-on in referred to as CA cos I can’t be bothered typing it).  The usual routine, an arvo of sketching people passing by and practicing your speed and accuracy. We meet on the steps of the GPO and weather permitting, hang about there or move on to other locations.

I managed to spot Harbour-Master as she waited for a tram and because she’s always dressed impeccably, I had to draw her. Its always the clothes that attracts me to sketch a person – you’ll see that trend in the other drawings I did that day Its a bit of a dodgy sketch cos I was still warming up. Eerrrggh. The one next to it is some more warm ups just of faces.

Gettin the hang of things…

This chick had the weirdest outfit….Shiny black leather/vinyl jacket – biker style….with a long, pale blue tie-dye skirt and weird sandal type things that were like sandals from the ankle down and boots from the ankle up. ODD.

The fat dude at the bottom – well he wasn’t fat. He was just wearing an enormous all weather jacket with equally enormous cargo shorts and then these tiny skinny legs sticking out the bottom.

Some more:

Now to the final drawings which are quite a bit better. Shows how much you can improve just by warming up. Just like a sports star! Hahahaa.
First…A hipster. Wearing faded double denim that looked vintage. White flappy shirt and t-shirt hanging out…..skinny skinny pants on skinny skinny legs and scuffed boots with white ankle socks (and ankles) showing. Hunched over suitably as befitting a hipster of his pedigree
And a very sharp looking old gentleman leaning against a pole listening to the folk band that was playing in front of us. He had a cool shape for drawing and was standing very still hehe. I completely FAILed on his face though ha. The chick is a woman that dashed by and I liked her hair but only had seconds to memorise her profile.

These are: a dude in a huge blue chambray shirt with skinny legs poking out from underneath. People with weird proportions are interesting – particularly when those proportions are entirely a result of the clothes they’re wearing.
There was also a little Aboriginal boy who was watching the band. He was holding a football and had his jumper draped and tied over his shoulder like one of those across body bags.
The girl was really pretty and had dyed orange hair and a side ponytail. I wish she had stayed longer because I liked her face – would have been good to get it down more accurately. The others are just more odd proportions.

That was it for the sketching that day. We headed down to see the Ron Mueck exhibition when it started to rain. Fantastic exhibition – if you’re in Melbourne I urge you to get to the NGV before the 18th of April and see it. Only $15 entry. If you don’t know who Ron Mueck is, here is a sample of what we saw:

Phew!! Such a massive post!
Seeya all again soon – oh and my life drawing starts on the 12th of April not the 21st so it’s sooner than I thought! YAY!
Bya!

Blah!

Sorry for the lack of posting…Been away for the weekend down at Wilsons Prom – frolicking in the waves and having fun….Posing for photographs and trashing a dress that only LOOKS vintage. Trashing I say, but I think it survived all the sand, salt and clambering over rocks. I picked it up at the Salvos around the corner for a mere $25. I will show you photos when they are ready….

Until then, this is a post to say BLAH – Not feeling it today despite my best intentions. Having a slight low moment and think I need to get back to sketching and anatomy before I try and finish something. Even though I feel like such a failure for not finishing anything decent in ages.

You know what I realised not too long ago?? That in all my years of learning art and calling myself an artist – I was never really taught how to draw. In primary school it was all about experimentation and basic rules of colour like what primary colours are etc. High school was mostly about art theory and learning particular art periods and well known artists in history. By the time I got to uni, it was expected that you knew how to draw or that you had no interest in actual technique and rather just wanted to paint. The most valuable thing I learned from school was my life drawing classes which comprised of one semester during my first year of my Fine Arts degree.
Everything else I know is self taught – Any inkling I might have of anatomy and serious techniques are from books, my parents and now ConceptArt.org. All I have going for me right now is my talent alone….I know I have it but quite frankly, that’s not enough. I need discipline and structured learning. I might have books on drawing the figure and calculating perspective, but they don’t give you feedback or the environment of a classroom where there is interaction with your peers and mentors.
I wonder if it’s a failing of Australia’s entire art education system or just the schools I went to? I know here in this country there is not much value placed on artists, instead we focus on sporting prowess. This is changing I know, albeit slowly. I don’t know that if I went and enrolled in another university here in Melbourne, if they would teach all the things I missed out on. It is all well and good to encourage the growth of ideas and the creative process, but if you don’t have a solid grounding of technique then what good is your art? Maybe this is a contentious issue and people disagree with me…If you do I would love to hear your thoughts.

I think this little ramble has inspired me to pursue more formal training. There are adult courses out there and uni degrees…but I don’t want the same thing as what I was learning in Tassie. Time to look into it! Any ideas send them my way please
Thanks for hearing me out!!

With Google Friend Connect that is! I had it on my old Blogspot blog but since I moved to WordPress I lost all my followers *sob*…..SO, now I figured out how to get it on this site and I’ve put a widget up right there ———>
Just under my other subscribing options.
So if it’s easier for you to follow me with Google then click away (and it makes me look popular too!).

Thanks!

Oh and here’s some cute. Just because.

Don’t you feel like that sometimes??