stefanie vd merwe
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Subjective Objects
Feature Investigation and Final Skull Piece
September 4, 2017
For our first unit of grade 9 art, we have been investigating the concept of what someone looks like versus what the are like. This unit is based around the idea of portraiture and learning how to understand and create portrait paintings ourself. In order to understand these ideas and concepts in portraiture art, we began by focusing on the concept of what someone looks like.
We did a series of investigations and small activities to understand the basis of painting the appearance of someone, by first focusing on drawing. To begin, we focused on comprehending the structure of a face, by looking at the anatomy of a skull. We based our knowledge on drawing skulls with a few basic steps that helped us understand the basis of a skull.
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Pre-Instruction and Understanding Skulls
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To draw a person it is important to firstly understand the basis of the face, and work your way up. In this case the basis of a face would be the bones; the skull. By learning about the anatomy of a skull, it would help us to further understand where all the facial features come from when we would create our own portrait paintings later on. To investigate the anatomy of a skull, we focused on the typical representation of a skull, simply to get a basis idea. In the image below we see there are many different aspects to a skull, however we focused on the main parts of a skull. This includes the zygomatic bone, the mandible, the nasal bone and the temporal.
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To first recognize what we already knew about drawing a skull, we did a quick pre-instruction drawing, where we were asked to draw a skull simply out of our memory. I felt that I had much to learn in terms of drawing a skull, as my pre-instruction was not impressive. After this, we moved on to properly understanding the basic steps to drawing a skull. This included the zygomatic bone, the mandible, the temporal and the nasal bone. I felt that this was easily understood and we all caught on rather quickly. To take it a step further, we analyzed the facial features of celebrities, by marking where each of their facial features were. This was a nice way of representing to us that not everyone has the same facial features, and that what we learnt was simply the basis. My celebrity was Dwayne Johnson, so naturally it was quite easy to notice where the bones began and ended for he has a very structured face.
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After this we began with the basic steps to easily draw a basic skull. This included with an egg shape for the head, then marking where the temporal was and drawing a horizontal and vertical line from this. This then led to drawing the zygomatic bone (the "sunglasses") and then the jaw along with a basic representation of where the teeth would be. Finally we added the orbit(s), and marked where the nasal bone was. These simple steps showed us how drawing a skull is not as difficult as it seems once you have the basic markings in. To draw these skulls we used a soft black charcoal, compressed black charcoal and white chalk. These new materials allowed us to add shading and depth with a few simple colors. I enjoyed using the soft charcoal for it was easily erasable, so I did not have to worry about mistakes, until I was happy with my final which I went over with the compressed charcoal.
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Final Skull Piece
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Once we felt confident we moved onto our final skull drawing, where we got a piece of grey paper, and used graphite and charcoal to create a good image of a skull. We drew out our base and began to add details using the charcoal; things like shading and color contrast were important at this stage. This not only allowed us to feel more comfortable with drawing a skull, but also granted us an opportunity to practice this new technique of using charcoal to draw and sketch a final piece. Showing us a new and unique technique, rather than just using graphite.
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Investigating more facial features
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After we finished investigating skulls, we moved onto building up a face by focusing on other facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth. To briefly practice this we attempted to draw our own eyes, nose and mouth to scale. This allowed us to develop our skills in drawing the details rather than the basic structure. I personally feel my drawing of the mouth is quite accurate, and one that I was proud of. Here is how all my drawings turned out:
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