Week 2

Focus Questions: Why are some things considered difficult to draw and other things easy? What do you thing is hard to draw? Do you think it is easier to draw from life or memory or imagination? Why?

okay...i get the answering questions deal, not entirely sure about the artist research stuff. what are we researching again? lessee... artists: kara walker, mark lombardi...both or just one? confused...

k.... let's go start with answering the goddamn questions:

difficult vs easy to draw? easy things are easy because they're simple shapes and simple colors with simple shadows. difficult things are more complex in shape, color/pattern, or because of the way the shadows are produced by this item. things can also be difficult because they may be things that are very difficult to see as flat. or because we think we know what they look like and thus get some of the proportions and stuff wrong.

people -- real people that are supposed to be recognizable from the drawings -- are extremely hard to draw. so are most things that i'm actually looking at. observational drawing is difficult for me in general. anything with soft edges...

i draw best from a sort of combination of life and imagination. imagination mostly because i like drawing imaginary things a lot, but i've found it works the best when combined with a bit of the observational stuff. there's no reason a goblin's hand shouldn't look a bit like a human's and having hands to observe means that the whole goblin looks a bit more real for having hands the onlooker and view as being functional.

questions overwith. onto the artist...

...which i really do wish i could skip...

so kara walker: i think i like that. silloettes. (stupid spellcheck, gives me "sellouts" as a suggestion for the misspelled word...) rather fantastical ones, at first glance. i think i like. they don't seem to really be doing fantastical things, just, the poses of the figures are very... etherial. fae-like. they're humans, not any sort of fairies (at least in the pictures i found) but that's the way they struck me. it's not a style i'd ever really want to work with myself -- course i'm also primarily a sculptor and silloettes (silouette? silouete? gah!) are something that's very much a flat media thing.

mark lombardi: wikipedia says "lombardi called his diagrams narrative structures and they are structurally similar to sociograms – a diagram drawn from the field of social network analysis". after looking up "social network analysis", i think i agree. it's odd. i'm not sure i could say anything more at the moment.