Sealacanth Studios: Colors and Bones

So I've realized that the Color Theory course I'm taking right now should actually be called "Perfect Craftsmanship." For the first two weeks we made millions upon millions of paint chips on bristol paper. And after hours of drawing grids, mixing gouache paint, and cutting out every chip with an exacto knife, we made... COLOR WHEELS!

Color Wheel (left) and Complimentary Colors (right)

There are many more where this came from, but I think you get the picture.

This past week we finally started a project called the "Andy Warhol Project." Basically, we chose an iconic image (or any recognizable image, really) to make four paintings of using different colors. I chose my personal idol, my dog Maddy.

First step was to create a stencil of the image. This was done by tracing the image onto tracing paper like so:

Once the stencil is made, you then have to turn it over and trace the lines on the back of the tracing paper with a graphite pencil. This is so when you retrace your image on the front side, the graphite on the back is pressed onto your final copy.

Then once you're completely sick of drawing the image, you get to turn it over and trace it again! Which, in this case, was four more times.

And what feels like 500 hours later, you have successfully made four prints of your image.
Side note: The easier way of doing this is using a light box and just tracing the image onto your final paper. But who wants to do things the easy way?

After we made our prints, we finally got to choose our colors. For this project, we created color combinations using our color wheel (above). We are making one painting with three colors that form a triangle on the wheel (I chose yellow-green, blue-violet and red-orange), colors that form a rectangle (blue, yellow-orange, violet and orange), colors that form a square (haven't decided) and one more with another square or rectangle combo. So far I've painted the triangle (left) and the first rectangle (right):

All complaining aside, the tediousness of working with gouache and making grids and tracing stencils pays off when you see the final result. Just two more to go!

In Figure Drawing, we have been studying the anatomical structure of the body (I don't think I could love this class more). Our first project was to draw the skeleton inside the model while they posed for us. First, we practiced with a skeleton by itself:

Then we had a model come in and we drew their contour. Our teacher then set up a skeleton in the same pose and we quickly sketched it inside the model's contour. This was my rough sketch on the first day. Notice the fourteen ribs instead of the realistic twenty. Had to change that later...

Later, we had to render the skeleton with realistic shading. However, no one has a skeleton lying around at home, so we had to make due with the images in the book "Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist" by Stephen Rodgers Peck. It has great images of body parts, but typically only from one side of the body, so if you don't have a scanner, you had to flip the images in your mind. Mind blowing.

So after three nights of staying up til 1 or 2am drawing this...

...I finally finished it. I only wish I didn't have other classes to worry about (Spanish Colonial art history from the 16th-18th century, I'm lookin' at you) so I could have worked on this without being sleep deprived.

Next up, the muscle system:

30 min sketch in class

I think since I'm doing a project called the "Andy Warhol project," I should talk about him this time. I'm probably no longer allowed to consider myself an artist after saying this, but I've never really been interested in Warhol. After reading about his work though, it's pretty fitting that I don't feel anything when I look at his art, because that was the point. Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement, and he was obsessed with the idea that if you repeat an image enough times, the viewer eventually becomes desensitized to the subject matter. In order to emphasize this, he wouldn't maintain his screen printer throughout a piece, making each print muddier than the first. It's ironic that the media has shown his images more times than I've ever seen an artist's work in the media. Not only is the subject meaningless, but now his artwork feels meaningless. It's like he's proven a meta-point within a point....