Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Final Observational Drawings

This isn't necessarily my best drawing of the entire semester, but I really like it. It was done on the day that we had the drawing competition and it was a timed drawing, 10 minutes. I like it because, even though it is just the back of her head, Sarah recognized that it was a drawing of her. The scanned image is not the best quality, but I think I did a pretty good job showing the values in her hair, which I have never really been able to draw. I won the category of "best line weight". I also appreciate the fact that it is "unfinished" because it was a timed drawing and I think that is an important aspect.


This drawing is out of my observational sketchbook. It is a picture of Zooey Deschanel. I am still not the best at drawing realistic faces, but I am proud of the shading that I did on her lips and in her sunglasses. This is also a little hard to see, but her lips actually look a little glossy and I definitely spent the majority of the time on her sunglasses which I think look pretty good.







Luminaire

This is my final luminaire. The materials I used were trace paper twisted and braided, glue and some fishing line.


This is a view from underneath, looking up into it. The shadows that it casts in the far left corner are the best representation of the intended "light effect" and what it actually does on the wall. It was really hard to capture with a camera. The shadows are very organic, free-flowing mimicking how light dances on water. When the fixture moves and spins which it easily does, it shows this even better.


The previous two pictures don't quite show the quality of light honestly either. I took them in an otherwise dark room so the lighting is very low, but I actually used a very shockingly bright bulb. I wanted the shadows to be dramatic and for the light to be bright white and very strong.

These two are detail views of the twisted and braided paper.



Some process work...



 This is a previous version that I made, I experimented with using black paper as well as trace paper, but it was not what I wanted.
 As I constructed a sphere which turned out to be a huge challenge, I made two halves with openings at each end and then connected them.



I had initially thought of using mesh wire, the screening that goes in windows and doors and I was going to manipulate it like it was soft and lacy. I was toying with the idea of using the twisted and braided strips inside overlapping but it started to get very busy. It was a cool idea but it didn't work well with light and it just ended up not looking at all how I had imagined. This is a detail view of how I experimented with folding and overlapping of the wire.