In our first unit, Artists Observe, we learned about drawing from observation. One of the first drawings that I did this unit was a blind contour line drawing of a bottle. A blind contour line drawing is a drawing with no looking at the paper, erasing, or picking up the pencil. This drawing greatly helped me start learning how to properly observe an object, by noticing all the little things about it and getting a feel for perspective.
This photo is of the blind contour line drawing I did of the bottle. Obviously it isn't the best or most realistic drawing, but drawing while only being able to look at the object in question really helped me observe all of the details I may have missed if I had been looking at my paper the whole time.
This is the drawing of the bottle I did after I completed my blind contour line drawing. As you can see, I paid attention to details such as the tape and the stickers on the side of the bottle, as well as the highlight from the light source. I also paid more attention to contour lines, as I used varying line thicknesses to add depth to the picture.
This picture was my observational contour line drawing, in which I observed my bobble head of Daryl from The Walking Dead. Here, I focused on composition and perspective, two different things we learned in this unit. I cut off the top of his head to achieve a more interesting composition, and I measured my object to try and make my drawing as accurate as possible, since I was more than tripling his proportions. One thing I didn't take into account was value, which we practiced working with a few days later.
My final drawing from this unit was a still life of objects from my third favorite movie, Mary Poppins. In this drawing, I took into account composition, proportions, and value. My composition is interesting because I have multiple items going off the page and converging in the middle, so your eye is drawn to the center. In this drawing, my use of value has improved greatly, you can see the highlight on the umbrella and the use of shading on the silk of the suffragette sash. Since the carpet bag was covered with a pattern, it was hard to noticeably give it value, but on the leather straps, I used a range of tones. Proportion wise, the items all look correct, and I achieved that by just using my observational skills that I learned in this unit to gather all the details and see how the different parts of the objects looked in relation to each other. Overall, I think I have grown artistically from the start of the unit to the end of the unit.