MY FASHION DESIGN PORTFOLIO – Life Drawing (Part 5)

We started learning about composition and the use of colour and shading to define depth. We used a combination of charcoal and conte to create the following ‘vinettes’. The first two are done in class using a male model and the natural background of the classsroom – which had a couple of old roman-style sculptures. I particularly like the B/W vinette with the 4 drawings, these were all done in quick 2-5 minute poses.

The next two were done at home for homework. We could spend a bit more time with these and as you can see…there isn’t quite the same intensity and rawness achieved with the quicker drawings with a real life model done in class. I guess this is a common reality when comparing life and still life drawings.

MY FASHION DESIGN PORFOLIO – Life Drawing (Part 6)

We started learning how to use paint to paint faces and self-portraits. Our first trial was to find an artist we liked and copy how they painted portraits of people. I managed to find an actual self-portrait done by Picasso himself (see below pic) and proceeded to paint it following his style.

This was the outcome:

The next exercise was to paint a self-portrait only using primary colours! This was super tricky, as you had to use colour to define shadows and depth when we were so used to using black and white.

Our homework was to paint another self-portrait, except this time we had to use secondary colours and preferably colour we hadn’t used much of. So I decided to use purple.

The following probably took the most amount of time and effort to do than any of the other life-drawing exercises and homework. We had to make a self-portrait using bits of paper, cardboard, magazine cutouts…anything that would stick on to our A1 sketch pad. It was really hard trying to find the right colour skin tone for me (the pic below looks like a european than an asian!), and also having to create a 3-D effect and shadows without being able to shade using paint or charcoal. The end result wasn’t too bad tho – although it really doesn’t look like me!