Assignment 1

 

Assignment 1

Mason Gatner

These are my drawings for my first assignment from Drawing Studio II class at the University of Lethbridge. The assignment was to make one drawing from observation, and another that was purely chance driven.

    The first drawing (above) was an observational drawing, not copied from a photo or another drawing. I wondered what to draw for this. There was a lot I wanted to draw from observation. One day, while I was taking a break, doing laundry and watching a horror movie, I looked over and saw my parent's chair, sitting there, catching light from the window and I thought, "Why am I thinking so hard about this? I like how the chair looks right now, and it's right there. Why not?" So, I grabbed my sketchbook, a mechanical pencil, a white stub for blending, and I drew the chair. I loved working on the shadows, the texture, and noticing the little details I never really noticed before, like the pattern on the fabric, or how the shadows were affected by a secondary light source. I can safely say, I'm happy with the result.

    The second drawing (the colourful one, above) was meant to be a drawing driven by chance. Thinking about what I wanted to draw for this project was much harder than deciding what to do for the first drawing. I didn't really know what a drawing driven by chance was supposed to look like. I asked my instructor, racked my brain, and wondered "what am I going to do for this?" It was a difficult decision because I consider myself a person who plans everything. There is something in my life I consider very unpredictable in my life: noise. So, one windy day, I grabbed some crayons, which I haven't used for years and thought that they might leave an interesting, chaotic effect, sat in my backyard, and tried to draw as many noises as I could. I ended up using different colours for different sounds: I used blue when I heard wind; I used green when I heard trees rustling in the wind; I used yellow when I heard something mechanical, like a car, lawn mower, or plane; and finally, I used red for the few people I heard talking. The resulting art, I hope, illustrates the things that I heard that afternoon.