10/14: BadA—

[Professor Choi]

Assignment for Wednesday: Oct 16. Just reading (Wikipedia entries are fine) about the artists that the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are named after. Most important is reading about WHEN they rose to prominence, especially in relation to each other, and seeing what kind of work they did. Being able to identify their most famous works will help further discourse.

Bonus: I’ve always thought that if there was a fifth hypothetical Ninja Turtle discovered more recently, they’d have a very specific name. If you can tell me which name I’m thinking of, pizza’s on me. But like the super cheap crap I’m not spending Marco’s money on y’all. Basically it’s the artist that I think is the natural “next artist” in the lineage of those first four artists.

Assignment due MONDAY Oct 21, which I suggest you get on as soon as possible, I’d rather you do a little bit every day than a lot on the last day before it’s due. Post on HERE both your reference photo AND as much of your drawing as you’ve been able to do, but at the very least the block in. This should be indicative of you being at a good spot to start adding details, but remember! I would rather you have a rough potato/stick person of the correct pose than a detailed drawing of NOT the correct pose.

This is your last assignment of just drawing what you’re seeing. You have very solid references, just draw exactly that, try to forget you’re drawing a figure, go back to the principles of drawing the horse, drawing the face, forging the signature, drawing the chair. You’ve been doing it all semester, you know what to do, all I do is repeat myself (as I warned you I’d do because I know the future.) We’re doing a complete shift into taking what we’ve done and applying it to gesture drawing, but we’re not touching that until November.

You guys are doing a great job. Do not think that it’s okay not to show what you’ve worked on, I want 15 out of 15 drawings by Monday, you guys need to get used to being proud of your work. You guys are AT MINIMUM amazing artists, my job is to squeeze that 93, 94, 95, 99 percent out of you to make sure you get the jobs you want.

[VenusA113]

Alexandria Velasquez

[Sy!]

Syan Elmore

[Space_Guy]

Patrick Amaya

[aecheverria]

Annalisa Echeverria



Update:

[Clarissa Soto]

Clarissa Soto

[Amarissa Soto]

Amarissa Soto

[anna.guerra]

Anna Guerra
<-----Final

[sofiadlc01]

Sofia De La Cruz

[Chdz415]

Christian Hernandez

[Professor Choi]

Okay! So there is no class today in house, so please follow the instructions here and continue your drawings until you have a finished piece.

I apologize that I am unable to be in class in person for this extended amount of time, but this is why it was important to post what you had on here.

Please read, not just the feedback for your own individual piece, but that of everyone else’s too; hopefully you agree with my assessments, but please also feel free to privately make your own asseememts of your classmates’ work and see how they may be relevant to your own drawings. We’ve established how it’s so much easier to see issues in the drawings of others than in our own drawings, so let’s use this opportunity to get into the mindset of objectively critiquing our own work.

Alexandria: Your proportions are really solid in terms of selling that slight foreshortening because we’re looking slightly from above the model, but I think it might be a little bit elongated as in he might be appearing a little bit taller than the reference. That said something I want you to really focus on, not just you, but the rest of the class as well, is the angle of the shoulders. His left shoulder is higher than his right shoulder in the reference, but you’ve drawn the opposite. Go ahead and fix that and then finish the details of your drawing. Something I want you to focus on is how he has pretty well-defined muscles in his arms so really try to capture those details, as well as the wrinkles in his clothes. In general though, this is really good.

Post in the next thread your continuing drawing by Monday same time please. Keep up the great work!

[Professor Choi]

Syan: This looks very good and is a really good example of a drawing that is 90% perfect, but the 10% that is off is changing the narrative and worse, the dynamism of the pose, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

There may seem to be more major issues like the mallet not resting on the shoulders, but I’d also like to focus on where you’ve placed the elbows where you’ve kind of lined them up, instead of the right one being much higher than the left, because the right shoulder is higher than the left, which sells to us this shift in weight distribution of the stance in the reference, which in turn makes us feel like the model is almost stepping towards us, which in turn sells this feeling of her towering over us and intimidating us very casually, which IS the bad-ass-ness of the entire image.

Also, you’ve drawn the legs larger and longer than the reference, which takes away how much the face is right up in our face, because the legs are farther back in comparison. This drawing is a textbook example of our subconscious insistence of “going to the default” as we draw, but please don’t start again unless you want to, things can be fixed piecemeal on this drawing, but you may find that you’ve erased everything in aggregate when all the fixes have been made, like Theseus’s Ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Please keep going and post the finished piece on the next three for Monday please. The fixes aren’t big ones individually, but their impacts ARE big, so please focus on that accuracy.

[Professor Choi]

Patrick: I’m seeing a pattern here Sorry not sorry for continuing to repeat myself over and over, I continue to point out that I’m really just saying the same stuff over and over, but the application takes a LONG TIME to get used to, and in the end we’ve had weeks, not years. It’s not going to come naturally, it’s something I hope you apply over a lifetime of work, not just a single semester for one class. Never forget that I’ve been doing this for twenty years but you continue to see me make the same mistakes you make.

A lot of the same issues as Sy’s drawing: A very solid drawing, but the “mistakes” are the “worst mistakes” to have made, just because of their impact to the pose.

Ahead of our starting to REALLY focus on the dynamism of our references and thus our drawings, I want us to focus on POSE more than anything else. DETAILS I know we can get in our sleep, that’s just mileage. WHAT we put down (what is the character wearing, holding, or even who or what IS the character) is nowhere near as important to us at this point as HOW we’ve put it down (angles, proportions) because THOSE are the things that sell us on the ADJECTIVE of the drawing, not the NOUN and VERB, which y'all can do in your sleep.

So Patrick, the main thing I want you to focus on is angles: What angle are your sunglasses leaning at in the drawing? Your shoulders? The bottom on your shirt? Your feet? All of these sell the Badassness of the pose, in particular how the angle of your head is so different from the angle of your shoulders, which sells to us how you’re almost looking down on us, or not even looking at us at all, like we’re not even worth paying attention to because of how cool you are.

This is a great reference you took! So now it’s time to convert it into a great drawing. Keep it up, let’s see the finished piece on Monday.

[Professor Choi]

Annalisa: I need your drawing, saving this space for your assessment.

[Professor Choi]

Clarissa: Wow! Everything is really good, exactly what I’m looking for in a block in, no details, just lines showing me that you know where everything is. Unfortunately, you will have to redraw this whole thing because of the first thirty seconds to a minute of your entire drawing.

The ONLY thing I’d ask you to focus on at this stage is the size of the front leg, in relation to everything else. But the difference between the drawing and the reference takes away ALL the impact of the pose.

But here’s the thing, at this point in the semester, I know you already know this, and I know that YOU know I already know this.

So I’m going to make the call right now, redraw this please. Make that front leg and foot as big as they need to be to sell the pose. And to do that you’re going to have to redraw the whole thing so it fits. I considered giving you the option to remove the page from your sketchbook and tape it onto a bigger sheet of paper, but I decided no, I’m going to make you redo it. Not only is it for the sake of getting mileage, but also it’s a philosophical thing, I want you to not be precious about work you’ve already invested, and also I need you to learn that had you just started again when you first noticed the error, which I’m sure you did, you would have saved yourself a lot of subsequent work. I hope you take that into your professional career.