Week Two | Classwork | 500 Word Practical Evaluation

The objective was to draw live people; the exercise wasn’t so much about visual accuracy but about the impressionistic value of the person or people that were being drawn. It was about the essence of the character in the person in front of me.

In this class, we had two hours to fill pages with quick, fluid doodles of real life. Not life drawing but live drawing. I didn’t like this task at all. I am usually quite calculated and measured when I draw; I think long and hard about where each line is gonna go. Drawing moving people was well out of my comfort zone and I think it turned out badly. I got so caught up in trying to capture people really fast that any semblance of style went completely out the window. The style of these drawings doesn’t look consistent at all and I got so caught up in trying to capture the character in the features, the drawings don’t look like mine at all. They are a lot cartoonier than my usual style. This really irks me, I think it just looks amateurish and messy.

I do think I worked quickly, the lack of pages is due to the amount of people that came into Starbucks – it wasn’t a time factor.

I definitely haven’t worked fluidly, the drawings look very scratchy and rough. I got a little more fluid towards the end of the exercise when my embarrassment over the rubbish drawings just turned into IDGAF.

Did I capture a sense of movement? Looking back, I think I actually did in quite a lot of the drawings, yea. Some are more static but I think quite a few have a good sense of movement, it’s about half and half.

Again, capturing a sense of personality and character in the drawings was successful in about half of them. The first page and the last page I think are the most successful in this. The middle, it sort of fell apart. (Although this is the stage in which I was getting disheartened.)

I’d like to say “oh, I’ll move forward and do some longer studies of people, which will be better”. But I know that this wasn’t the point of the exercise. I think quick studies are something I really need to practice at so I can get more comfortable with it. In employment, I will be expected to come up with concepts that have character very quickly and I need to be able to make them attractive and stylistic as well as fast, with character, and all these other things.

So from here, I’m gonna take the opportunity when I can to do some more of these quick character studies for practice. I want to get much more skillful in this area and practice is the only way to do that. I also want to start sharing these studies with other people to get crit. Not with these, I can’t, they’re TOO bad – maybe after a bit more practice. It would be good to see how others rate my work and actually, to get tips as to how they deal with the problems I have. Other people may have solutions for issues I find hard to get around.

I didn’t like this task at all. I am usually quite calculated and measured when I draw; I think long and hard about where each line is gonna go. Drawing moving people was well out of my comfort zone and I think it turned out badly. I got so caught up in trying to capture people really fast that any semblance of style went completely out the window. The style of these drawings doesn’t look consistent at all and I got so caught up in trying to capture the character in the features, the drawings don’t look like mine at all. They are a lot cartoonier than my usual style. This really irks me, I think it just looks amateurish and messy.

I do think I worked quickly, the lack of pages is due to the amount of people that came into Starbucks – it wasn’t a time factor.

I definitely haven’t worked fluidly, the drawings look very scratchy and rough. I got a little more fluid towards the end of the exercise when my embarrassment over the rubbish drawings just turned into IDGAF.

Did I capture a sense of movement? Looking back, I think I actually did in quite a lot of the drawings, yea. Some are more static but I think quite a few have a good sense of movement, it’s about half and half.

Again, capturing a sense of personality and character in the drawings was successful in about half of them. The first page and the last page I think are the most successful in this. The middle, it sort of fell apart. (Although this is the stage in which I was getting disheartened.)

I’d like to say “oh, I’ll move forward and do some longer studies of people, which will be better”. But I know that this wasn’t the point of the exercise. I think quick studies are something I really need to practice at so I can get more comfortable with it. In employment, I will be expected to come up with concepts that have character very quickly and I need to be able to make them attractive and stylistic as well as fast, with character, and all these other things.

So from here, I’m gonna take the opportunity when I can to do some more of these quick character studies for practice. I want to get much more skillful in this area and practice is the only way to do that. I also want to start sharing these studies with other people to get crit. Not with these, I can’t, they’re TOO bad – maybe after a bit more practice. It would be good to see how others rate my work and actually, to get tips as to how they deal with the problems I have. Other people may have solutions for issues I find hard to get around.