Bright blue ripples

This is the rest of the artwork from Drawing II at UMaine that I haven't previously posted! Our final project was primarily in class, although I spent quite a few hours out of class working on it as well. We had to create a landscape diptych, and I chose to try my hand at two snapshots I'd taken in the North Cascades on two different glaciers. The two pieces could be one continuous scene, but separated into parts, or different places of perspectives that went well together. I chose a scene off our group walking around the small beautiful melt bonds on little Iceworm Glacier in the Mt Daniels area. On the right is a view of Camp Kaiser, a cool area on a hike to Mt Baker. I wanted some of the lines of ice, snow, water, rock, and sky, to somewhat flow into one another between pieces, while also creating some tension since they don't match up. I enjoyed working with a dry media because whenever I have done large landscape I have always painted with acrylics. Also, after my first year of school, it was fun to try out new method of mark-making to build up the two views!

Glacial landscape diptych

Camp Kaiser, so beautiful! A popular mountain goat hangout

Iceworm glacier, small, so a good day to take a break from tons of measurements and sketch!

A homework assignment while we were drawing the figure in class was to depict a figure in any environment, and show their interaction with it. I created this after the first drawing I did of Jackson in a previous post in which the mood "isolation" was conveyed. I had him pose for me, and he gave me the idea to have him sit in this tree. It is a large tree on campus, those are the actual size of its branches! We call it the dinosaur tree because it seems like a thick brachiosaurus neck you are sitting on! I did this in a mix of charcoal as well as ink that I painted on!

Jackson in our secret dino tree!

Close-up

I am not a huge fan of drawing things with reflections such as in glass and water, so I wasn't that excited to get a assignment specifically telling us to: "draw some sort of glass vase with a metallic utensil inside, filled partway with water, and resting on some sort of cloth or paper". This is one of the few homework drawings that it was harder to interpret in an interesting way (at least for me), the guidelines were stricter than usual. I was going to Jackson's house for his parents' birthday weekend, and so I took advantage of stuff they had. the elliptical view of a round vase or cup at a tilted perspective is somewhat difficult, so that is definitely imperfect, but it doesn't really bother me. I did have a fun time working on this, but it is a somewhat difficult and not quite as enjoyable still-life.

Twisted reflections

We did a couple of abstract "draw to music" type of assignment towards the end of the semester. I spent good time on them, but they were a nice break from all the observation assignments the rest of the semester. The top one was simply responding to loud and soft sounds, and the bottom one was done while listening to Zoe Keating's "Optimism". 

Which dominates - loud or soft?

"Optimism" is a beautiful piece, it is calm and happy

I really loved figure drawing. We had one male model come in for about 5 consecutive classes and pose for us. I have tons of newsprint piece filled with quick gestures of him, from 30 seconds to 3 minutes to 10 minutes. Towards the end of class, after warming up for a while with different types of gesture drawings, we did longer pieces, either in charcoal or pastel. I am really looking forward to taking a figure drawing and anatomy class next semester, as well as a painting class!

I bet he got uncomfortable during the long poses - he got to move around every 20 minutes

First day longer pose

Probably about 10 to 15 minutes

About 45 minutes

All green!