So, I am confined at the moment to my parents house because of all things I had to come down with it appears that I have mono! I blame it on public transportation. Anyways because of this I will be writing here a lot more over the next few days since I have off from school for the rest of this week and will just be working on..well school stuff..while trying to rest and get functioning for school Monday! Basically in my misery I am going to inflict my rantings on my lovely blog here, all about art of course but far more detailed than they have been recently because I have the time to talk and think!
This entry is...more practice for that final project in my Drawing Observation and Invention course! This was a lot easier to do though in my opinion. When you look at another artists work and try to imitate their style and recreate the piece the planes of light are already defined, it is simplified for you. As my professor says, doing reproductions is like learning from the masters. They become your teacher as you try to solve the problems they already found solutions to by picking apart their work and imitating it the best you can. Our assignment for homework was to do this with Bronzino's painting Portrait of a Young Man. Seeing as we were instructed to use charcoal (that is the medium that our final portrait will be done in) the challenge became slightly greater. How do you imitate PAINT with CHARCOAL?? Ideally he chose this painting because it simplifies shadows, showing a clear sense of where the light is coming from, and there is a solid feeling to the young man in the portrait. He has "weight" to him as my professor would say.
Honestly I tend to find the young man in the portrait a bit pompous. It doesn't help that I had this image recently in an art history exam so I'm geared towards thinking that. This is only a cropping of the actual image. In the actual one you see his whole torso and his arms, two bannister looking objects near him, and a book in one hand. The banisters are adorned with mythical figures heads that pretty much stand for foolish youth! He was poking fun at those who thought that he was in fact a pompous and foolhardy young man without any real good sense. I think knowing this about the painting helped me to work on the reconstruction, I looked much closer at the features and was able to attribute emotion to them. For example, his eyes have always looked kind of sleepy and aloof to me. As if he is just tolerating whatever it is you might be saying. His eyes are also slightly...skewed really. When the painting is looked at head on it looks like he has a lazy eye! One eye looks straight ahead at the audience
while the other eye looks over to the side slightly. According to my art history professor this was to give the painting a bit of life and make the eyes appear as if they were following you when you walk past it. Meaning viewed from the side it's suppose to still look like it's looking at you. I don't know if that actually works or not...but it is definitely interesting!
My reconstruction was done in two nights, mostly because my illness is greatly impairing my ability to sit and work through anything all at once due to pain and exhaustion! But after those two nights of working on it this is what I came up with! Not perfect I know, but I think it's pretty good! I tried to focus more on the face and the accuracy of the shadows than on the clothing...mostly because there are a lot of folds in that clothing and I really don't think that was the point of the assignment! Looking at it now I realize I subconsciously fixed the eyes so that they were facing the same direction. And I think that I made his posture better? In fact I think my version is even more lazy than Bronzino's! But all in all I enjoyed doing this portrait, I enjoy reconstructions period. Each one is like a personal challenge. You are trying to be as good as someone who has already been proven GREAT.
Seeing as I have Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and part of Sunday here at the home of the parentals I'm going to use that time to my advantage! I will be doing a few more portrait reconstructions in my sketchbook, just with pencil but all focused on shadows and depth of the figure. I have my portrait here to work on as well but I won't post that until it's finished. I have my 3D Process sketch book to work on which should be fun, my professor thinks of our sketchbooks as collages and journals and whatever we want them to be. She instructed me to have many pages filled out on Tuesday of next week because I'm missing class this Thursday. I also have art history stuff here to read up on, and another kind of self portrait for Digital! I'm kinda excited about that one because it isn't a literal self portrait! I get to make things interesting and play with photoshop some more! I also might have a paper to start revising all things depending!
So yes! Lots to do which means lots of posts here as well! But for now this invalid needs to get some sleep, so goodnight until tomorrow Blog Land.
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