Traditional Art - Aircraft Study #12

 

My aircraft thumbnail sketches were created with the aim to sort out composition. The aircraft I’d chosen to draw was quite small in size so I felt like certain angles wouldn’t show much interesting aspects to the plane and the composition overall could look quite empty so I chose a fairly standard perspective to create the final render from. It’s simple but I felt it worked best for this particular aircraft- if in future I do a more complex aircraft I feel a more abstract perspective could do it better justice.

Getting the correct tonal values were a bit of a challenge because some portions of the aircraft were very dark whereas some were very light. Also, a large majority of the aircraft was shiny metallic so conveying that material type without going too dark in areas was a bit of a task. I started rendering from the darkest areas like the nose of the aircraft and then went back and darkened it throughout rendering if I felt some part needed to be darker to show more contrast. It was a back and forth balance of keeping the darkest darks strong enough to hold contrast against the rest of the aircraft but not too dark that it looked flat.

Traditional Art - Vehicle Study #11

 

For my vehicle drawing, I chose to render a three-wheeled beetle car from the museum virtual tour. With my proprietary thumbnail sketches, I wanted to get a better understanding of the main shape of the car because although it looked pretty simple like a cube, there was actually some complexities that came with the curved of the car. Trying to get the roundness to come across without make it look too round of too flat was a bit difficult but the starting sketches helped with that.

There were minimal major tonal shifts on the actual vehicle but there were some stark highlights on the main peak of each curve so I darkened down the overall tone of the car to get them to read better. I tried to ensure that my shading followed the curves of the car but on aspects like the hood of the car I could’ve neatened up my shading more when going over certain areas to darken down the tone.

Traditional Art - Clothed Figure #10

 For my three-quarter figure, I used various colour combinations in order to achieve a wider variety of colours within my piece. I had a limited selection of colours to begin with so I had to experiment what colours blended together to create more accurate colours to my reference. The skin was mainly comprised of a mix of orange and light brown, varying the strength to create a more even skin tone. For parts of the drawing like the shadow on the neck and towards the underside of the face, I mixed brown and light blue to create a type of grey colour with flesh undertones to it. At first, I’d considered just using a darker brown but by using blue I was able to get a more accurate shadow according to the lighting of my reference which I thought made for a better finish.

I feel as though this piece helped me improve on my colouring techniques as I’ve experimented with ways of creating colours that I don’t just have on hand and how to blend them more effectively. Things I have picked up from doing this are methods I can definitely take forward into future pieces.

Traditional Art - Black and Colour Media #9

 

For my figure drawing I chose to compose both male and female figures into one drawing to create a piece like this. I chose this instead of doing both separately because I wanted to experiment with how I could change the colours and shadows with a figure in the foreground to make it stand out against a figure in the background, creating 3-dimensional space between them.

I put my female figure in the foreground as I felt her pose would better suit the foreground position. It was a bit tricky deciding how to overlap the 2 figures together. I didn’t want to completely obscure one from view so figuring out the placement was the first hurdle when sketching.

When applying colour, I wanted to show a contrast between the male and female figure so that their forms didn’t accidentally blend together. With this in mind I decided to use softer shading on the foreground figure and slightly harsher, more sketching shading for the background figure. I had limited colours to work with so I felt this would be the best approach for getting the contrast I want. I applied colours to the main curved of each form, stronger colours towards the darker ambient occlusion areas and the main highlights being the white of the page. I feel as though I could’ve gone slightly less harsh on the shading in the background figure just to erase the distinct lines you can see in some portions, that’ll be something I keep in mind in future when I do more studies.

Traditional Art - China Online Museum #8

 

Within the China Online Museum, there was one ink piece that I found particularly interesting because of the techniques used. It was the “Thatched Cottage in the Western Mountains” by Tang Yin.

I found this artwork particularly interesting because of how the ink washes are used against the paper to create the sense of foggy mountain ranges. The ink for the mountains are used in a gradient, the darker tones being towards the top with it getting lighter towards the bottom. That being said, there are areas within the darkest points of the gradient that have, most likely, been covered before adding the ink wash so that there are gaps within the gradient, creating details within the mountain. This contrasts the details found in the foreground of lighter rocks with dark details overlayed on top.

The careful choice to leave certain areas without ink to act as fog really creates an ominous yet intriguing atmosphere to the piece as a whole. The control of ink strength adds subtlety to the piece that makes it feel oddly peaceful. It also brings your focus to the portions of the piece that are in heavier ink, like the rocks, which leads your eye to notice details you may have missed like the people in the house and by the cliff edge.

Traditional Art - Ink Figures #7

 

Using ink to create sketches was a bit of a daunting trial as I hadn’t used this kind of medium before for sketching purposes. I did some minor experiments beforehand to get the gist of how the ink handles and how much I would need to water it down to get certain tones and such. It was also a bit of a trial keeping a steady hand with the paint brush. As much as I aimed for this to be free and gestural, naturally I couldn’t be too free or else I could layer too much ink on or splash ink on places I didn’t want to.

With the sketches, I mainly gave the main body forms an outline with thicker, darker ink and then went over the shadows with a wash of lighter ink, layering it at times to get additional darker tones. I used a thin paint brush for the majority of the work as that would give mw better control. I feel as though I could’ve added more variation to my line weight with the ink to create some more interesting shape design. In future that’d be something I’d look to improve on.

Traditional art - Figure Studies #6

 

For my figure drawing studies, I chose to do quick timed sketches (10 minutes for each sketch) rather than longer, more detailed studies. I chose this method because I can be quite rigid in the sketching stage when it comes to full or three-quarter figures and with that rigidness, I can draw things disproportionately or just not have enough time to get the whole figure in place. By limiting myself to a much shorter time and tasking myself to get the major forms in place, I can focus on the body as a whole and not become fixated on specific areas for too long. I feel like I was able to effectively pinpoint how to convey a shape with minimal lines and how that works with the figure as a whole.