Term 6, Value and Light I, Week 7
For a description of this unit see my Value and Light I unit plan. For full context, see the description of my Art Home School Curriculum.
Retrospective
This was the last week of my Concept Design Boot Camp class at Brainstorm School. Overall, it was a great experience. The most important thing I learned was how to create a process or recipe to follow so that I am never sitting there wondering what to draw. That was always my biggest problem when trying to draw from imagination before. I am a fan of structure, as you can probably tell from this blog, so being able to add structure to imaginative drawing is great for me. Hopefully the pages below do a good job of showing the process. Start by generating a lot of quick ideas. Silhouettes and quick sketches work well for this. If you get stuck or can’t think of anything, find reference material. Then pick a few of your favorite designs and do more refined sketches and some color variations. Keep refining as long as you like. It also helps to have a checklist of things to focus on like paying attention to big, medium and small in terms of proportions, details, composition, and pretty much everything.
My only criticism of the class is that sometimes the feedback was vague and similar for several students. It wasn’t always vague. Some weeks I got really good and specific feedback. But other weeks it was just “push more.” I’ve decided to take two classes over the summer semester, which starts in 7 weeks. I’m still not sure what I’m going to study until then.
Log
Drawings and Critiques
This is the portfolio I submitted for our final class, which was a critique of all the work we did over the last 8 weeks. The major critique for me was to focus more on story telling and background behind my designs. I’m a little confused about that because when I consume art, I’m judging it purely on its visual appeal, and not on story. I’ve never looked at a piece of art and thought “this doesn’t look very good, but it tells an interesting story so therefore it’s good art.” On the other hand, these are professionals in the industry giving this advice, so I should probably listen to them.
I had a little time to get back to Scott Robertson’s “How to Render” (which was supposed to be the focus of this unit until my class usurped it). These are exercises in rendering curved forms and X-Y-Z volumes.
