Week 7

During my life drawing class this week I again started off with some warm ups. After a while I attempted drawing the studio.

I tried to bear in mind the vertical distortion of my view using a pen to line up the verticals Infront of me in order to better translate them to paper. However, some of the verticals, especially round the door, don't seem consistent. Overall it's still a good drawing.

I did think about applying what I learnt about mirror planes to the table but in my mind I thought about how I couldn't determine where the mirror line was. In hindsight it may have been good practice to try and attempt accurately mirroring the table but instead I just eyeballed it. I did use the duplication technique on the bricks and I like how they came out. Overall it was a lot of estimating distances still.

I talked to one of my tutors about it and they told me about curvilinear perspective where the vertical distortion of something Infront of you tends to have a slight curve. Drawing a scene from nothing can cause it to look clinical and odd and this is due to a lack of curving distortion since this is closer to how people see the world

My tutor bought up Antonio Lopez Garcia specifically in order to look and analyse some of their work

Antonio López García, Gran Via, 1936, oil on canvus.

The distortion in this peice is very evident in the forground elements and surves to sell the perspective and physical distance between the nearer and further elements.

Antonio López García, Escape into life, 1936, pencil.

In this piece the curve is very subtle but still noticeably there. The picture is less technically precise in this aspect but in this way adds the realism of how we view the world through a subtly curved lens. It's an aspect most people don't think about until properly focusing on it, even then it's still hard to see. If you were sitting in this room and you were to measure the width of the far wall from the middle compared to the top or bottom you would get very slight differences.

Kim Jung Gi, Flying to Poland, 2022, pen on paper

A more extreme example is the work of Kim Jung Gi who uses an exaggerated form of curvilinear perspective to add more of their surroundings into the picture. The effect isn't natural in a way and gives a somewhat fisheye look but the technique is effective and captures surrounding space in a unique way that both feels grounded but mind boggling.

This is practically unacheivable and nowhere near my level in these weeks but it's something to think about.

My tutor also recommended measuring accurately by holding out your hand strait Infront of you and using the pen to measure, then applying that measurement to paper, this is called 'Sight sizing'.

I set up some boxes in my room and tried to apply this. My results came out odd? The distortion was greater then I was expecting and didn't curve much, along with the image being fairly zoomed in. This maybe something I need to do more in order to understand it but it did help me see the distortion a bit better at least.

I ended up trying a different method in which I'd find out the name of it is 'Comparative measurement'

This time I still used the pen to measure but more relitivly. I would size up how thick a box was and compair it to how big the gap in the door was. I'd find different factors of the scene that had similer sizes or would be about half another length of a different object.

This picture felt a lot more acurate to the first. There's a slight distortion there, maybe could have pushed it further but I was trying to mentain accurate propotion to life. If I were closer to the subject the distortion may have played a bigger part. Some elements didn't line up perfectly but overall this seemed quite effective.

Finally for this week I attempted a more extreme distortion drawing of my messy living room. I started with a curved grid in order to keep the distortion consistent and applied 1 point perspective skewing the verticals and horizontals. I applied a bit of curve to the perspective lines that merge to point on the horizon to keep with the curving of the piece. I like how the drawing came out and the effect it gives off, only major issues I have with the piece is getting the angled objects in the scene looking off, I'm not sure how to go about applying the curve to them snice they're not facing the viewer strait on and so don't follow the same perspective lines.