Media Design Studio Blog

I think the point of last week's work is about " To adjust the uncomfortable feeling" and "To feel what you cannot feel before". I divide them into two parts. To adjust the uncomfortable feeling Both the pictures are drawn on September 19th, midnight with music randomly chosen I draw the left one in pen because I want to force myself not to revise. And I can have the weird feeling like some seconds I was drawing a face however some seconds a vase.  As I said in the presentation, it was out of my expectation that I didn't have the odd feeling when I was drawing upside down. To feel what you cannot feel before I left the right twos to reflect   light to show their texture. To draw differently, I chose the Ted toy which can change its position easily, and I try two different color's iPad screen protectors as a different texture.  I plan to overlap them together to show they are one object from diffe...

Drawing Upside-Down Assignment, 8.5"x11", pencil This week we challenged our eyes and minds as we tried to transcend the right and left brain restraints. Both the "Vases and Faces" and the upside-down drawing exercises were difficult to complete; because I could tell that I was drawing a face or a person, my brain wanted the drawing to look different than the lines actually represented on the page. I did my best to focus on what I was actually seeing in terms of line and shape rather than what my mind was interpreting the images as.  Vases and Faces Assignment, 9"x7", pencil In choosing an object for my still life, I wanted something relatively simple that I could envision representing multiple times in different ways. I also wanted an object that would be interesting, and even a little challenging, to draw. I chose to draw a small ceramic pitcher I had at home.  Colored pencil pitcher, 8"x7" In creating my three drawings, I...

    Still Life Drawing  --Lava Before I did the vases and faces practice, I thought it was a very simple one. However, when I was doing the practice, I was confused, especially the right part. I even didn’t know where should be convex and where should be concave. When I got to the mouth part, I drew several wrong lines (Ken says it's a good idea to think of it as a beard). As for the upside down drawing exercises, I started from the leg and chair part. Because there are two straight lines for the chair, I saw these as the baseline. The process of drawing is not as difficult as I might think. But the whole time I couldn't help thinking about where each line belonged. I think the most difficult part to draw is the hands. Since his fingers are crossed, it is difficult to draw the lines accurately. Wine Cabinet When choosing still life, I plan to choose three types of paintings. The first was light versus no light, the second was external versus...

The drawings for this week really challenged my mind on what drawing based on illusion and the left right brain concept in artistic pieces. I had no idea what to expect and when i started to draw it especially the faces and vases part it kind of became confusing because i felt that i was supposed to face the opposite side when drawing one part of it. For the drawings on an object that doesn't move, i chose the Microwave because it is this ubiquitous machine that sits in my house, always and forgotten but ready to spring to life when needed to warm some food or hot drink. On this week's assignment, i chose to challenge myself with using colors and embraced it. I played around with colors and also used material like an envelope and a utility bill paper to create some of the drawings on.  Microwave drawing. Used Pencil  Microwave drawing. Used color pencil and an envelope   Drawing of the man upside down. Used Pencil  Faces and Vases. Used Pencil ...

This week’s assignment includes three different drawings: vases and faces, upside down and still life drawing. It is an interesting process for me to have such kind of brain training in drawing which is so different from the way I used to look at drawing. In terms of the vases and faces drawing, an interesting thing I found is that I spend much more time on the right side that I chose to draw first than the left side. As some may notice, there are many traces of modifications on the right side, while the line on the left side almost has no traces of changes. When I finished both sides and started comparing the two parts, I found the left side is better than the right one. Here, the difficult part for me is that I tried many times to modify the lines on the right side, but I could hardly find back the feeling I had for drawing the left one, so the two are somewhat not evenly distributed.  Picasso’s upside-down drawing is a challenging one, on which I spent about one ...

by Sumi Dey The Vases and Faces exercise from Drawing With the Right Side of the Brain was definitely interesting! Despite having taken a lot of visual art classes in the past, I've never experienced or tried a drawing exercise with such a strong biological focus. It was pretty fun getting out of my comfort zone and exploring a new way of drawing.  (Graphite, 8" x 5") Initially, the Vases and Faces exercise seemed relatively easy after I read the instructions. Carrying it out definitely proved to be more difficult and mind-bending than I thought it would be.  The first profile took me very little time and I started off somewhat confident. Despite tracing over the original profile and becoming acquainted it, I lost all sense of direction the moment I attempted the second profile. The proportions were very off. I vividly remember feeling a disconnect as I tried to match the two sides. As you can see, we have a pretty disproportionate v...

The full presentation Through last week’s assignment, I came to understand the importance of truly seeing an object as it is, instead of seeing an object in my mind’s eye. I never realized how much I rely on my brain’s automatic assumptions about an object when drawing. In learning to draw, I realized that instead of “Drawing 101,” more fundamentally, the process is actually “Seeing 101.” With the upside down drawing exercise, watching the modules helped tremendously in getting an idea about how to tackle the drawing. I ended up going with the strategy of chunking the picture in rows. Although it felt less intimidating that way, I did notice that my brain still defaulted to making sense of it. I started with drawing the head, so my brain automatically thought, “Here are the eyes, the nose, etc.” But, thinking about the drawing in this way, even with the chunking, still made it intimidating. It wasn’t until I looked at each part of the drawing as individual shapes and lines, an...

Hastily reconstructed presentation board My concept for this week was the idea of process. Our assignments were focused on experimenting with different mediums, types of paper, and methodologies of drawing. I wanted my presentation to highlight different types of paper and different mediums, as well as how they might overlap and intersect, and so I left two of the drawings in sketchbooks/drawing pads and draped them over the top of the foam board. I kept the sticky note drawing on the sticky note pad for the same reason. The idea of process and materials also came through with how I chose to mount the pictures: I used pieces of charcoal eraser (which essentially worked as a less effective, but serviceable, poster putty) to fix everything to the board. Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take a picture before taking down the drawings--and in the process of putting it back up, the upside-down man got a little crumpled. Graphite on sketchbook paper, 3.5"x5.5" My o...