05 October, 2012

Drawing and Painting: Composition


Our topic this week was COMPOSITION.  We learned about structural composition and placement.  I worked from a reference photo and chose to do an unconventional cropping of the image to create a more dynamic composition.  The teacher gave it the "thumbs up", so I came home feeling much more pleased than I did a couple of weeks ago.  (We did not have class last week, so that is where the lost week went.)

I am working on a smoother paper than I worked on with the Still Life class last spring.  The dimples in paper made for working with charcoal kinda bug me...in particular, the texture of Strathmore charcoal paper.  I don't like it much.  This is a heavy weight sketch paper by Raffine, it's got a nice tooth to it.  I am really loving the charcoal and plan to continue with it.  I guess one thing I love about it is all the nice variation in tone that can be achieved by working the surface (I tend to use my fingers).  I enjoy getting my fingers in there and blend and smooth the color out.