[one drawing #17] moonlight

July 5, 2018July 5, 2018Leave a comment

This is another practice of copying the great Georges Seurat’s charcoal drawing.
I usually choose the drawings that look pretty easy, and every time end up crying out with agony “Oh, it’s so much harder than my expectation! (Maybe he had better paper… or better eraser?)”

Practice after Seurat’s <Factories by Moonlight>

I had to improvise a looooooooot on purpose or not on purpose (mostly not….rather involuntarily forced to!) 🧐
This is Seurat’s original painting <Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight>

Georges Seurat <Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight>, Conté crayon on paper

ps: a little slideshow to commemorate finishing my first sketchbook!

[one drawing #16] mickey mouse

July 4, 2018July 4, 2018Leave a comment

While visiting Orlando last month, I bought a book called <Celebrated Characters Collection>. What a great book, that I can learn how to draw famous Disney characters!

So I drew Mickey Mouse with a soft pencil and pastel. I just followed the direction on the book then like 30 mins later, I had (a little bit cubby) Mickey Mouse on my small sketchbook! (I drew Donald Duck too, haha)

Mickey Mouse

The second practice was to DRAW the letters ‘Mickey Mouse.’

Mickey Mouse, the letters

My teacher Anne McGhee told me that I have to learn to not trust my brain. To fool the brain, I drew the letters sideway like this.

33, dancing people, track, skyscrapers (not ‘scaper’ :-P), track…

Tried to lie to my brain that these are not letters but are ’33’, ‘dancing people’, ‘skyscraper’ etc. Of course, they are letters, but it was fun just to try to look at the letters with other perspective.

Below is the book <‘Celebrated Characters Collection’> by Walter Foster Jr. and a couple of pages I followed.

[one drawing #15] rays

July 3, 2018July 6, 2018Leave a comment

I finally got a fixative spray from Blick Art Materials in Central Square, Cambridge (MA). It means that I can keep my charcoal drawings without worrying about them evaporating(?)!Charcoal is my favorite material so far because so many shades can be expressed with such a simple stick… of course, when your hand is not so tight/shaky. And it is so much fun to erase out spaces. I love charcoal also because it is the first material that my teacher (Anne McGhee) taught me to draw. Lastly, it looks so cool (artist-like?… haha) to draw with charcoal!To celebrate my first purchase of fixative spray, I decided to draw something with charcoal today. The only problem was that it was already 10:00pm when I could sit down for drawing. I skimmed through the drawing book of Seurat that I borrowed from Cambridge Public Library, and found the fantastic drawing that I wanted to copy. The drawing seemed to have every aspects that I needed to practice for like middle tone, dark parts, erased out spaces etc. (Oh, how amazing that Seurat expresses the rays by erasing out the sunlight!)

Georges Seurat, ‘Rays’, 1884

So audaciously I drew, and here is my charcoal drawing: so FIXED to the sketchbook with my new FIXATIVE spray!I know, I know… it looks so different from Seurat’s but well…. that is why he is the Master! I noticed so may things I want to change after I took the photo, but found out it was impossible to fix charcoal drawing after putting on the fixative spray.

*one small tip: The book <Georges Seurat, the Drawings> by Museum of Modern Art (MoMA in NY) is the absolute best if you want to study Seurat’s drawings and paintings.

Georges Seurat <The Drawings>

[one drawing #14] window

July 2, 2018July 4, 2018Leave a comment

I was hoping to draw outside today to escape all-day-long air conditioning. However, it was just TOO hot that I just decided to stay inside.
This is a quick charcoal (+pastel) sketch practice, looking out the window with a tilted blind.

A Window with a Tilted Blind…With or Without Tree View

[one drawing #13] cells

July 1, 2018July 2, 2018Leave a comment

I am not really into modern art yet, but when I visited Met Museum in NY I was shocked by Chuck Close’s huge painting ‘Lucas.’ He divided the face of ‘Lucas’ into hundreds (perhaps thousands) of cells and drew it cell by cell. It came up to be fabulous mixture of abstraction+realism.

So, after getting back to sizzling Cambridge (MA), I tried to practice Close’s technique today. I picked a photo from old Time magazine, put a transparent grid (that I made) and started to draw one cell at a time. I started to draw while watching the World Cup game (Croatia vs Sweden. Congrats, Croatians!) and was pretty sure I could finish the drawing by the end of the game. However, it took much longer than I expected… about four hours. I didn’t learn how to use colors yet, so obviously I got some colors wrong. Plus there are other problems I am still discovering with my drawing 😞 , but I am just happy that I didn’t give up this ‘harder-than-I-thought’ project.

Salute to Mr. Close!