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Contour Line Drawing: Self Portrait

I noticed that there were many more straight lines present in the background than my subject (myself), made up with mostly curved ones. This was my first time drawing a person in many years, and drawing my face was particularly challenging. I found it difficult to draw and place the eyes, nose, and lips accurately on the face. As one of my classmates brought to my attention, it has a bit of a cartoon style to it. I think it might be due to the way I drew my eyes and the lack of detail in drawing my skin (ex. Not drawing creases, etc.). This wasn’t on purpose, it was due to a lack of observing those things! I think I would like to experiment doing more detailed sketches in future assignments.

This is a contour line drawing as I drew it by focusing on the outlines and edges of my subject and background. I didn’t do any shading. As a result, the my drawing is made of shapes and lines and leaves out aspects such as depth that would be done by other techniques, like shading.

This is a closed-composition drawing as my subject (myself) is fully included in the drawing. I placed myself in the middle, as I am holding my board to my right and looking to my left. I decided to do a closed-composition drawing as I wanted to capture what I was doing (sitting on the floor, holding a board and glancing). If I were to do this again, I would consider shifting myself to the left of the paper more so that I could centre myself at the left focal points of the rule of thirds grid. It would also give more space in the direction that I am looking at in the drawing. The background of the drawing drawing is fairly busy, so there is not that much negative space other than the bottom of the right side of the paper. I drew the background with lighter lines, so I wouldn’t compromise the balance of the drawing. I think that drawing myself with mostly curved lines and the background with mostly straight lines (as previously mentioned) helps to differentiate the subject and the background.

I drew lines with greater value and thickness for more obvious shapes like my face and glasses. I drew lighter and thinner lines for creases like in my jacket, as well as the background. The reason for this variation of thickness value was to make the main features of the subject stand out and have other lines add to it.

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Closed composition

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Closed composition

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Open composition

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Negative Space: Kitchen Utensils

In this assignment, we highlighted negative space through colouring the negative space (areas not occupied by kitchen utensils) with India ink. This meant that in the piece, there would be no clear distinction between utensils that overlapped. Negative space drawings lack dimension because only the outlines of the objects are shown. This is displayed in my piece by the utensils looking very flattened. I decided to draw the objects the closest I could to their life-size. This was because they were the perfect size to occupy my half piece of cartridge paper the way I wanted to depict them. Throughout the drawing process, I laid the utensils on top of my drawings of them to make sure that they were the same size and thus in the right proportion to each other. This also helped me check if I was missing any features of the utensils. In my original piece for this assignment, I (unintentionally) chose to use all very linear utensils which also had the same length. After finishing it, I realized there was a lack of variety and wanted to change that. I redid the assignment and chose a greater variety of utensils to make the composition more visually interesting. I wanted to include different widths, patterns, and shapes. As previously mentioned, I drew all the objects the same size as they are in real life so I did not have to adjust the scale of them. In my first version of this assignment, I struggled with how to balance the utensils in the piece. I wanted to use the rule of thirds and the golden ratio, but the result (including the final product) always looked very unnatural. This time around, I crossed utensils at the approximate areas of the focal points of a rule of thirds grid. I also tried to achieve balance by putting the two more detailed utensils (the whisk and lemon juicer) on different sides of the page and crossing them with less detailed utensils. I tried to disperse the utensils across the page so that the positive space wasn’t concentrated in one area. To defamiliarize my objects, I crossed and connected them. It is fairly obvious that flipper and the whisk are two different objects, but I think the cappuccino cup and the lemon juicer can cause the viewer to think more about if they actually are one whole object. I experimented with placing ribbon between my objects, but decided not to include it because I felt like there was enough positive space in my piece without it.

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Hands and Feet: Line Exploration

Through observation, I noticed the different “regions” within my hand. I first saw this as I made my gesture drawing, drawing different shaped ovoids to make up my hand.  In my cross contour line drawing, that translated into using different-looking curves for different regions. The most difficult part of the assignment for me was the cross-contour line drawing. I had a hard time imagining where how the curves should look - how and which way they should bend. For my first version, I drew the lines how I had seen other classmates and examples online draw them. However, I didn’t understand how they decided how to draw them. After talking with Dr. Milton during office hours, I gained a better understanding on how to decide what type of lines to draw and redid the cross contoured hands and feet.

For the gesture drawing, I first divided the hand and foot into different rough shapes. I then used those shapes to guide myself to draw the rough overall shapes of the two body parts. A gesture drawing is a quick, rough capture of the form of the object.

The blind contour drawing allowed me to focus on the lines that make up the hand and foot without worrying too much about how they all look together. I used these lines to then help me create the regular contour drawing, in which I could decide how to put them together to properly represent a hand and foot.

The cross contour drawing got me to understand my hand and foot more by drawing lines across them to represent dimension. An area made with “deeper” curves means that area on the subject is either more raised or less raised than an area made with more shallow curves. Whether the curves are concave or convex depend on the perspective the subject is draw in and also regions of the subject that have a dip or a curve respectively.

I used light, medium-weight lines for the gesture drawing to help me the sketch the subjects quickly. I also did not focus much on in value and line weight was focusing on the subject form rather than depth and details. For the blind contour drawing, I used a  bit more pressure than I did for the gesture drawing - resulting in a heavier and darker line. This was because the shape of the lines was the only thing I was focusing on and I was intentional about how they looked. For the contour line drawing, I used lines a bit lighter and thinner than the blind contour line drawing as I was more careful about how they looked all together, and had less confidence than when I didn’t need to care about the placement of them. For the cross contour line drawing, I used mostly thin lines with a medium weight since I wanted to fit many lines in a small amount of space. I used slightly darker and thicker lines in the areas that my hand and foot creased, to show compression and condensation of the skin.

I used pencils in the 4-6B range for the first 3 types of drawings and a 3B pencil for the cross contour drawing. My natural style is using slow gesturing and smooth lines, and that is what I used in all the drawings for this assignment.

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Life Drawing: Figure in Contour Line

This was my first time drawing a live model. It made me much more aware of the human anatomy and how different body parts look! One part was the presence of muscles on shoulders, arms and legs. It was a new experience to draw arms and legs using multiple lines rather than just a few smooth curves. I had difficulty drawing the background - translating the soft folds of the sheets into a drawing was a challenge.

I did an approximately ten-minute gesture sketch to capture the form of the model and then drew my contour lines on top of that. The gesture sketch helped to inform me of the shapes and parts of the body. I did not use cross contour lines in this drawing.

To help make the model stand out from the background, I used lines of greater value and weight, especially for her main body parts. I used slightly lighter and thinner lines for her features (like eyebrows and nose). I used even lighter lines for the background to balance out the dark lines in the subject. I made softer and lighter lines with the side of my pencil to draw the folds of the sheets.

I used solely B-grade graphite pencils for this. I applied less pressure when I was making the gesture sketch so it would not stand out in the final product. I drew gesture drawing fairly quickly. I applied more pressure with higher B-grade pencils when I was sure of the form of the model, to create contour lines. I drew the contour lines more slowly as I wanted to make sure I was sure of where I wanted to create the dark lines.

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The greyscale