I seem to have a pattern of color schemes being orange/red & green.
I want to continue speed painting. While I’m not satisfied with how I am now, I know that if I continue these series of landscapes, I’ll get the hang of it and they won’t be categorized as “the ugliest things I’ve ever drawn.”
Here are the five speedpaints I did of outdoor environments. This time, my reference photos were based on various photographers such as Chris Steele-Perkins, Reuben Wu, and Naoya Hatakeyama. Wu is a surreal photographer, while Hatakeyama and Steele-Perkins were featured in the Prix Pictet portfolios’ “Earth.” I tried to limit my color palette to two to three colors. Each took about an hour to 30 minutes.
References: Chris Steele-Perkins, Reuben Wu, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Paula H.
This week, I focused on outside environments than interior. More focused was placed on atmospheric perspective and composition. Overall, they were “easier” to do than the interiors; interior involved getting the perspective right and if it looked off, then the whole picture was ruined. For nature, it’s easier to “lie” about perspective and not get too focused on it. For the next week’s series of drawings, I plan to do outdoor environments, except in color this time.
Here is someone else’s journey on how to get better at environments/backgrounds.
Image courtesy of foervraengd. Clicking the image goes to their page.
4 interior environment studies. It was hard to choose appropriate reference photos because interior design photography relies on objects looking as washed out as possible. Very difficult to get any contrast. Depending on the picture, I spent as much as 1 to to 2 hours on one picture. Also, interior design relies a lot on one perspective. It makes sense, but it makes the pictures all kind of look the same.
I worked in black and white primarily because 1., I usually work in value first 2., less to worry about in speedpaints, more to paint; 3. the reference photos were mostly monochromatic to begin with.
I’m not happy with these pictures. Probably because I only allowed myself to work on them for 2 hours maximum. I suppose I did learn how to be a bit better with perspective. It’s called patience and time.
All in all, it wasn’t a successful week. I’m not happy with the results but hope that outside environments will yield better progress.
References:
http://www.casadevalentina.com.br/profissionais/clarissa-strauss/endereco-de-luxo-1.html
http://georgianadesign.tumblr.com/post/64027537556/longmont-residence-unique-in-houston-thompson
http://memilana.tumblr.com/post/67134728462
http://georgianadesign.tumblr.com/post/18186076589/a-neoclassical-style-residence-in-san-francisco
The last project for Design For Media is called Creative Habit. One is supposed to draw/make/do the same thing every day for 4 weeks.
If I’m required to do something, I might as well make it worth it.
Long story short, I am really bad at drawing environments and backgrounds. Because, ugh, who cares about the space that the figure is in? It’s all about the figure, right!? So I’ve never gotten practice in drawing them. So I’m not very good at them.
So drawing at least one every day seems like a good way to get better at it.
The first week will be interiors. Play with point-perspective and whatnot.
The second week will be outdoor environment. Play with atmospheric perspective.
The third week is tentative, maybe a focus on composition or fantasy environments? Figures within the spaces, finally?
The fourth week is to make up my own spaces, without any references.
I am not sure if it’s specific enough of a topic, though. I’m guessing that if I choose to do a house the first day in the first week, I have to do inside of houses for the rest of the first week. We’ll see.
Last Thursday, Lyle and I started the assembly of the sculpture. Here’s a picture of all the wooden planks we were able to get out of one piece of plywood (minus a few tiny ones, about a third of the size of the ones shown).
Here it is “assembled” without glue and using the inspiration logs (orange) for more wood support. It’s looking a little teepee ish and we’re not sure how much room to make for the fog machine, so other group members made a circle on a newspaper for us. Then we realized we needed a base, because carrying this thing just by itself would have been impossible. And it was. It came apart.
Luckily, Lyle had another plywood plank. Makes the structure a lot more stable. We decided to leave out a section of logs to fit in the lights, hose, and machine (if you can see the drawn on rectangle on the base). The sculpture is pretty much done, this picture was just taken in the middle of gluing and construction.
I wonder what we’ll do for color…
Hey look it’s a post about the sculpture! Yay. So, last Thursday, Dionna, and Lyle and I (with Brittany to document) were starting to build the fire sculpture using the director’s concept of three planks forming a triangle, and the “triangle” would be a “log”. Well, then we saw someone making a wave-like wooden sculpture with the techniques Dionna and I originally had in mind. (I didn’t take a picture of the sculpture but both Dionna and Brittany did for reference.) Also, we found these guys in the scrap wood bin: 
There were about four of them. And look at the texture the person made with (probably) a dremel!
That could perfect recreate the texture of bark we were searching for! We originally thought of using real bark and glue it onto the “logs”, but that introduces the concept of rot which might be for interesting behavior, but when we have a fog machine and precipitation (and possibly a humidifier), bacteria growth on the sculpture should probably be kept to a minimum. And Lyle had plywood already so we just textured the hell out of his planks and then he’ll cut them so we’re not risking shaving off skin from carving into tiny “logs”.
We aren’t recreating the techniques the original person used on the orange sticks and we’re definitely not using the same drill bit, but it’s similar and once we paint them or get a stain on them, they won’t look like we’re trying to perfectly recreate wood like the director wanted, but we are making a representation of bark like he wanted.
Yay progress,
So our task for this week is to think up guerrilla marketing ideas to gain a wider audience for the project. Besides the many accounts on other sites, we want the local community to take notice.
Unfortunately, the ideas I came up with weren’t very practical for the spaces we have to use.
An idea was to have the triangle shape inserted into Bibles? Like bookmarks, and in the exact position the verse is?
Or perhaps stick them in between merchandise at grocery stores like this advertisement:
This way, it reaches pretty much anyone who goes to the store, library, anywhere you can put a bookmark. It’s subtle and not too obnoxious.
Or perhaps use an obnoxious technique and use glow-in-the-dark paint to paint over a sign/building/etc?
I don’t know what we would deface but it’s an idea!
Since the idea has changed, my job and duties have changed, as well. A big part of the new project is centered around a fire sculpture that the audience, in a way, interacts with. The director had an idea of interlocked pieces to make up a single entity. I had a little trouble thinking in a way of “slotted” pieces making one sculpture, even with reference photos of similar sculptures:
However, using a basic idea of slotted pieces coming together, it reminded me of a design project I did last year:
And so, using the method my group and I used to create this piece, I made a rudimentary sketch/layout of what the fire sculpture might look like:
A “shape” of the fire would be on its own track and its position could easily be adjusted. I suppose perpendicular tracks could be added and slots added onto shapes to make more piece intersect with each other. However, given our time constraints, if a group of 4 was able to just barely make the project above in five weeks and two to three people are given four weeks to make something more complicated than that? I don’t believe it’s feasible to go more complicated, MAYBE if our only duties are to construct this and no more, but I believe are responsibilities reach father than just this part of the project.
Tori Draws 