Year 2 - Week 9 - November 28th - December 02nd

It’s all about Interior design this week. Being asked to redesign the 9^th floor for our course can either be easy or hard, personally I have a few ideas but I would have just preferred to draw an interior at home. It’s been another Imagineering project on top of another lately, with the vehicle, War of the Worlds, Mortal Engines and now this… I’m putting ideas down on paper but kind of struggling to visualise it in action. I’m thinking I want to re-design the Game Art seminar room however, basically I’m think of designing a room similar to the Queens building seminar we use for films and guest lectures, only difference is that this is a lot smaller than that, probably about 1/4^th of the size and the ideas are still in practise as of now. But we’ve never done something like this so it’s interesting looking inspirational ideas for interior design. I imagine this is what we’ll have to do with the group projects coming up next month, designing each room so it’s as if it’s getting us prepared for it.

Lately I’ve been drawing a lot of still life, in what I call my perspective ‘sketchbook’. I’ve been setting up still life objects to draw daily and found that it is coming along quite well; I’ve done quite a few as far. Basically I’m using it as not just for 12 hours self-directed study but also primarily to try and improve my rendering ability. Back in College I remember looking at the work of Giorgio Morandi, were he would paint bottles and other still life objects but not the labels stuck on the sides of them.

 
Naura Morta - Giorgio Morandi (1929)

Still Life with Cups and Boxes (1951)

My style of drawing is will differ from the next person like it does with everyone, the way I see it is that the labels that come on household object such as boxes etc. are not necessary, the way I see is that they aren’t needed because they don’t add anything to the image which is why I like to draw the basic shapes of the objects in perspective then add the lighting in. It feels more ‘cleaner’ and ‘neater’ if you will just like Morandi’s work. I found that the style in which I draw in is quite similar to Morandi’s, he proves that all the detail is that necessary in an image. I personally struggle with drawing logo’s etc. and can’t copy them quite accurately, his style lets you forget about all that, because it’s not always about how much detail you can put in, sometimes you can find yourself getting so caught up in detail you forget the bigger picture. Morandi himself explored composition, placement and different shapes and forms these everyday objects provided as well as lighting.

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/still_life/morandi/giorgio_morandi.htm

I’ve also been using the still life to explore composition more also, something I talked about a couple of weeks ago but also something we talked about this week to. I’m trying to set up the still life in a way that I can put the horizon line about 3/4ths of the way up the page but also try to use the rule of thirds so that the placement of the object on the desk isn’t just dead in the centre of the image. If I stand the desk in which the objects are placed on against the corner of the room I can use the lighting of the wall to define the hard edge of the objects I’m drawing, it also allows me a wide viewing angle in which I pick a spot to sit and then draw the object itself which is placed in position so it matches up with the horizon line.

Cicular Still Life

Still Life Box 

It can sound confusing, and it is, composition is still something I’m trying to master, but I feel like I’m slowly but surely getting better at it.