Major Project Update: A Detour Into Perspective

Wikimedia Commons

Last week, I said I'd be drawing more individual features of the face. I promise you I'm on my way to that! However, I realized that in order to do this knowledgeably, I needed to take a detour into the principles of perspective.

Perspective is the study of the way three-dimensional forms appear in space. For most of my life, I've avoided studying the topic because I found it boring and unnecessary. Not to mention difficult and confusing. I felt that if I just looked at what I was drawing closely enough, I won't need to understand perspective.

WRONG! You are very, very wrong!

Understanding the principles of perspective makes drawing SO MUCH easier. When you understand perspective, you remove the guesswork from drawing. It's essential if you want to know how to depict three-dimensional forms on the two-dimensional picture plane.

This is where I hit my roadblock. I was trying to invent simple three-dimensional armatures for facial features, but I had no idea whether they were accurate when I "rotated" them on the page. Upon this realization, I dove into the lectures of Marshall Vandruff.

About a year ago, I started listening to Stan Prokopenko's art YouTube channel while at work (I'm an artist's assistant, and I spend a lot of time sitting at a table). For a few of his videos, he has the artist Marshall Vandruff on as a guest for critiquing students' drawings. Though I can't remember which video it was, they gave a plug for Vandruff's series of lectures on perspective from 1994. The first lecture in this class is available for free on Youtube (link here). The whole series of lectures can be purchased for $12 on his website. I bought them earlier this year, and I was so glad that I did! He is an amazing teacher, and the informative he provides is invaluable. He explains these tricky concepts better than I've ever heard them before. For the first time, perspective was making sense to me!

Claire "Too Many Tabs Open" Marks

I listened to all the lectures this January, but I didn't really absorb the information. This week I went back to work my way through the lectures again, and this time I was committed to retaining his teachings. His basic premise is this: If you master how to draw cubes and cylinders in every way imaginable, then you can draw literally anything. And he's correct. But it's a lot more difficult than it looks!

I have a long way to go, but just doing a few sessions of practice has already helped me feel more confident:

I have four or five lectures to go, and I'll spend the rest of this week continuing to draw these basic forms in perspective. By the end of the week, I'll be looking into various schemes for drawing the planes of the head. I have a few YouTube videos already in mind. Stay tuned! 

Prompt #8: Learning Environments

“For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.”

― Benjamin Franklin

We can do better than this...

There’s no question that the layout and setup of our classrooms has a fundamental impact on our students’ engagement. The aesthetics of a space and the way it’s designed dictate the function of that space and suggest an attitude for those who inhabit it.We all know that if we want students to interact with one another and have a discussion, the desks should be oriented in a circle or horseshoe-shape rather than in sweat-factory rows. These are some questions we should all be asking ourselves (rapid-fire):

• Does everything have its “proper” place? 
• What is the most efficient way I can organize this space? 
• Does this layout make sense?
• What is the primary purpose of this space?
• How am I supposed to feel when I’m in this space? 
• Where are the light sources, and what pieces of furniture should be closest to them? 
• Is there any furniture which is taking up space unnecessarily? 
• Are we going to have to rearrange the furniture at any time? When and for what purpose?
• Where are the chalkboards/whiteboards/smartboards? Will all the students be able to see them well?
• Art rooms are notorious for being messy and cluttered with old art projects and works in progress. How am I going to utilize storage spaces in my room?
• Will students feel stifled or inspired by the space I’ve created? 

Everything in a classroom must be as thoughtfully and logically placed as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Like should go with like. When students become familiar with the room, they should have no question about where a certain item is kept. If there is a bookshelf in your room, the books should be organized in some way—by subject, by author’s name, by title, etc. When the fixed elements of a classroom have been sorted into their proper ordered and kept tidy, you clear the way for students to engage with the space and learn uninhibited by clutter and chaos. Organized chaos is ok, but a cluttered mess makes students distracted and anxious. And being overwhelmed kills creativity. The space you set up and maintain is a reflection of your expectations for the students and the culture of your classroom.

Most teachers don’t have the luxury of designing a classroom from the ground up. We have to inherit a room and its old furniture and make the most of it. If this is an older building, the electrical infrastructure and layout probably won’t be current enough to accommodate new technologies like smartboards and ceiling projectors. This doesn’t have to be a setback, however. You don’t need to most up-to-date technology to get your students engaged with learning in your room. I think that if you maintain efficiency and order in the layout of your room while keeping it flexible enough for desks to be reoriented as-needed, you can create an ideal “learning environment” to suit your classroom’s needs.

To give a personal anecdote: After going through a health crisis several years ago, my grandpa moved in with my folks. Since I was away at art college, he inherited my old bedroom in the front of the house. When my brother and I both moved back after graduating (we’re twins), he got his old bedroom back, and I took up residence in the attic. I slept on a rollaway cot—the same one I had in college. When the summer can around and the heat up there become unbearable, I decided on a whim to relocate my base of operation to the basement. When my brother moved out in the fall, I moved into his bedroom. Finally, a space designed to be a REAL bedroom!

Each time I moved, I had to reorganize my furniture and belongings in a way that fulfilled my needs and maximized the potential of each space. The attic and basement especially are spaces that were never meant to be used in the way a bedroom is used. They were designed for storage and for doing messy work, not for peaceful slumber. Our attic is a long room with slanted ceilings. The overhead lights haven’t worked since I was a child. If I wanted to use my desk at all for drawing and work, it had to go by the small front windows—the only natural light source available. The two electrical outlets dictated where I put my lamp, nightstand, and bed. I didn’t have room for a large table, and my one chair was an old one taken from the dining room, no wheels. Though we had placed most of the stored items in bins behind a curtain off to the side, the space never felt completely “mine.” Every once in a while, someone would have to come up to rummage around for something. The same thing happened when I was in our basement. I had to work around an obnoxious support beam running up through the middle of the floor.

But to get to my point…We as teachers are often forced into situations that are less than ideal. We have to be resourceful and make the best out of what we’re given. No matter what space we inherit, it’s our responsibility to make it run as efficiently as possible. It’s our job to turn it into an engaging and flexible space by setting it up thoughtfully.

An open, contemporary learning space (Wikimedia Commons)

I agree with Bridget McCrea when she states in her blog post Designing the 21st Century K-12 Classroom that "furniture should be able to accommodate multiple learners and then be repositioned for independent learning." Furniture that is on wheels allows desks to be rearranged as needed. In my future classroom, I’ll be rearranging my tables all the time. Changing up the desks can help to keep students on their toes. It gets students to engage with the space and with their classmates in new ways. I think it’s also important to blur the boundaries between the grades like at the High-Tech High. Back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse, all the students worked together. The schoolmaster supervised while the older students taught to the younger ones. I think it’s a good practice which institutions of schooling should start to bring back. The design of this school is also innovative. The high ceilings and glass walls contribute to a sense of openness and encourages curious students to see what their classmates are working on. There’s always artwork on display. You really get the sense from seeing the space that the students are encouraged to explore and grow.

There is a lot of buzz about online classes nowadays. Many schools are offering online classes, breaking the conventions of the typical “learning space.” A student’s learning space is wherever they’re able to connect to a Wi-Fi signal. Google Apps for Education (including g-mail, Google Classroom, Google Contacts, Google Drive, Good Docs, and others) make it possible for students to interact with peers and collaborate with their teachers from anywhere and on their own time. The learning space is no longer limited by bell schedule. 

I don’t spend too much time on the University of Akron campus, but one of the places I love going to is the Bierce Library. Its outside and the upper levels have a distinctly Cold War feel, which instantly transports me to a time and place before our lives became immersed in digital technology. I like it. It makes me feel rooted in the past. The library, however, would be intolerably stuffy if it weren’t for the redesigned downstairs. The first floor is designed to be an open, multi-purpose space. There’s a Starbucks (I don’t drink coffee, but to many, this is important), movable chairs and tables, an IT desk, and many, many tables for studying. I haven’t explored it very much, but I’ve heard about the 3D printer somewhere on the first floor. It’s exciting to hear that the space is being used for learning that goes beyond the quiet reading cubicle. The library has always been is a place of quiet contemplation, and now it is turning into a place of peer-to-peer inquiry and discussion. I think it’s nice.

Cool Tool #5: SlateBox

Slatebox (visit here!) is a website for creating mind maps, flow charts, and other info-graphics for organizing information. As the homepage says...

It's a tool designed specifically for use in a classroom setting. I signed up for the free 30-day trial, but it is $8 per month to use if you want to continue using it. 

The boards (the website calls them slates) can be customized in a multitude of ways. You add word bubbles by clicking on the "+" and can drag them wherever you want. You can change the shape, color, and size of each word bubble. When you open up a new slate, you begin with a plain green bubble.

It was fun to play around and put together a simple diagram: 

Use the grey bar on the left to zoom in/out of your slate.

I like the idea of making word bubble diagrams digitally rather than manually. I find that when I do them on paper, they quickly become a tangled mess. This program is nice, because you don't have to worry about running out of room on the page, and you can move the bubbles around and organize them freely.

Would I use this as a tool with my students? Possibly. It could be very useful if you're trying to help students understand the connections between concepts and their hierarchy. I could also see myself using this when I'm planning my curriculum and getting my lesson plans in order. I wouldn't pay $8.00 per month for this for my personal use, but if teachers could fit this into their classroom activities, it could be worth it. I could see history teachers using this tool effectively to illustrate the links between concepts and historical periods. Students could use it to make a multi-dimensional timeline.

Verdict: Not bad! But at the end of the day, diagramming with pencil and paper isn't THAT much of a hassle. 

Major Project: Sketching Away...(beating the shark into submission)

UPDATE: Right...so after this first week, I've realized that I've bitten off way more than I can chew.

Instead of working on the features of the head and the entire figure, I'm going to stick to just the head.

My start has been very rusty, but that's exactly what I expected. I began working from Drawing: A Search For Form by Joseph Mugnaini and Janice Lovoos (pages 30, 34, and 61 scanned below). I drew a lot of cylinders and copied some of the illustrations. It was a painful process of getting the muscle memory of drawing back. I had to re-teach myself what it feels like to see when I'm drawing. I'm happy to be nurturing that feeling again--it's a feeling a aliveness and urgency. It's a space without doubt.









My sketches:

I write notes to myself too. "True drawing is an athletic feat." Giving myself a pep talk. Writing and drawing is a form of thinking, processing ideas.

After working from the book for awhile, I was frustrated. I knew that I had to start drawing from life. I knew it would be painful, having been away for so long. But I did it anyways. I drew my bedpost and a dumbbell. Looking at it now, it isn't as bad as I thought at the time. But I still am getting too focused on the details of the things I was drawing. I wasn't simplifying the forms into their basic structural elements like the book was teaching. 

Simplicity is hard. 

I went back to the book and did some more 

I drew an empty jam jar. 

I tried to break this little Pegasus toy down to its structural basics. Still too much detail, not enough focus on structure. But old habits die hard. Every drawing is teaching me what I could be doing differently. 

A stegosaurus toy

A couple days later, I selected another book to work from: The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin. This book has a detailed analysis of the facial features. I started with the nose, because it's the most static feature (unlike the eyes and lips, which can change a lot). I copied some of the illustrations and tried to make my own simplified model that I could "rotate" on the page. When I started doing nose sketches, I thought to myself: "Holy crap...I could spend five weeks just understanding the nose!!" That's the moment I decided that I needed to simplify my project goals a bit. 

From the book:

And my sketches: 

I'm going to continue working on the facial features individually and watch a few videos on the structure of the entire head. By the end of my project, my goal will be to have structural studies of the head from a front view, profile, and three-quarter angle. 

If nothing else, this week's drawing sessions have gotten me out of the rut and back on the road again. It'll take some time before I work myself up, and that's okay. I'm excited to draw again, and that's what's important. 

Prompt #7: "Good artists copy; great artists steal" Copyright and Fair Use

As I mentioned before, it’s important for us teachers to be model digital citizens to our students. This duty extends to copyright law. It’s our responsibility to fully understand the laws surrounding copyrighted material, what qualifies as public domain and fair use, and how to use creative commons licenses. And if our students are going to have an online presence, or may in the future, it’s crucial that they’re able to make sense of these things, too. Unless we’re only teaching from our personal writings and discoveries (which, let’s face it, none of us are smart enough for that), we should always show respect to the original authors of a work by citing and using their works properly.

The question of appropriating images and using copyrighted materials is an always-relevant issue in the field of art and, by extent, the art classroom. For young artists just getting started, it’s important to become familiar with the law. Many young artists begin honing their skills by copying cartoon characters and making fan art using photos of celebrities. There’s nothing wrong with this. They are essentially making a “forgery” of the photograph in order to hone their skills, not to sell the work for money. Making copies of master drawings to learn how to draw has been an exercise practiced by student-artists for centuries. These drawings won’t be considered a market replacement for the original drawings. And of course drawings by the likes of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Degas are over 75 years old; they are most definitely in the public domain.However, when students are starting to become more advanced and come up with concepts for original artistic pieces, they need to be made aware that they can’t pass off someone else’s artwork for their own.

Remember the HOPE poster from Obama's 2008 campaign? The artist Shepard Fairey was sued by the Associate Press for using the photo as a source. Art teachers can use real-world instances like these to explain the concept of fair use with students. It's a vital concept for young artists to grasp. If a student-artist has an idea for a painting, say, where they depict the president and their cabinet as the Avengers (I don’t know…It’s the first thing I could think of…), we need to be able to identify potential legal pitfalls of doing this. Or say, instead of the Avengers painting, a student needs a picture of a specific type of dog as a reference and they take one from Google Images. We have to ask the student the question: Why MUST you use that image instead of another one? And if you must use this image, how will you be transforming it in a way that makes it somehow your own? It’s often a good idea for art teachers to encourage artists to take their own reference pictures whenever possible. In these days, almost every student carries a camera with them, so this isn’t so much to ask.

Copyright and ownership are fascinating to talk about in the context of art. There’s a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” There are countless instances in art history where artists are deriving ideas and “stealing” from other artists. It’s exciting to think that everyone’s artwork is part of a long chain of artists feeding off of other people’s novel ideas. However, there is a clear difference between being influenced by another artist and claiming someone else’s work as one’s. This is a slippery slope with post-modernism in the second half of the twentieth century (and who-knows-what-movement-this-is-now in the twenty-first century). A couple years ago, the established New York artist Richard Prince had a show a Gagosian Gallery featuring screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos with his comments Photoshopped underneath. Because of his addition of text, his pieces that use the photography of (compared to him) unknown artists qualify as fair use. The gallery was selling these pieces for around $100,000 each. This caused an enormous uproar, rightfully so. Another infamous piece is Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans,a photograph (or re-photograph) of one of Depression-era photographer Walker Evans’ images.

Top: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936
Bottom: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4, 1981

Levine’s piece explained by the art history textbook Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being by Jonathan Fineberg: 

“ …Levine photographed a work by Walker Evans in a manner scarcely distinguishable from the original and presented it as her own work…[Her] art explores the possibility of expressing oneself using the ready-made expressions of someone else, asking: can this method express authentic feeling? Is it original?” [And Fineberg on Richard Prince (since it’s in the same paragraph)] “Similarly, Richard Prince introduced the concept of ‘rephotogrphy’ in 1977, making photographs of pictures in magazine advertisements and then blowing them up, cropping, or rearranging them to take on new meanings by new juxtapositions [fancy big word]. His work underscores the postmodern emphasis on the surface of events, ‘scanning’ experience as in the media and computers rather than penetrating its depth.” (p. 390)

Anyhow, I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent, but these issues are fascinating to talk about. Issues of ethics get people riled up!

I really like the website Photos for Class, which filters images that don’t fall into the public domain. When you download the picture, the file comes with a watermark with the proper accreditation already written out.

Creative people of all sorts have suffered due to illegal sharing and exploitation of their original work. We need to explain that we may not think anything of downloading a song, movie, or picture illegally. But if we are allowed to steal from others, then shouldn’t other people be allowed to steal from us? We need to show students how to respect others’ creative works by obtaining them legally.

More food for thought:

Scholastic Art & Writing Awards on Copyright and Plagiarism 

Austin Kleon's TED talk "Steal Like and Artist"

Cool Tool #4: Google Slides

For anyone who has a Google e-mail account, I would highly recommend using Google Slides for making presentations. (Download here.) If you're already familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint, you'll find Google Slides to be straightforward and easy to use. It has many similar features and works in virtually the same way.

One of the benefits to Google Slides over PowerPoint is that you can invite others to collaborate on a presentation. I had to make slide presentations with a group of people earlier this semester, and this feature made the work go much faster and more efficiently. Instead of us all having to coordinate a meeting and huddle around one computer, we could just log onto Google Slides from out respective devices and work on the same presentation simultaneously.

Another benefit of this app is that you can access your presentation from any computer with Internet access. No more worrying about whether or not you remembered to save your presentation to your flashdrive! However, the option to export your presentation as a ppt or pdf file is also there.

Access Google Slides by clicking on your apps when you're logged into gmail.

When you open Google Slides, you see your old presentations saved below.

Format and features are very similar to PowerPoint.

I see this being a Cool Tool that I'll use all the time to give presentations. If my students are working with Chromebooks, I would probably make them use this app to do their slideshows, too.

Presentation for Educational Psychology

Working Outline

Working Outline

Draftsmanship

·         Understand the structure of the human body and its components

·         Understand the mechanisms by which the body moves

·         Understand and know by heart the types of folds by name

·         Make drawings appear more solid

·         Explain the difference between modeling, rendering, and other levels of drawing

·         Come up with a solid head and body from imagination

Painting

·         Oil painting technique

o  Do an oil painting of my great-grandmother

·         Acrylic painting technique

·         Watercolor technique

·         Do the same still life in all 3 media

Ceramics and Sculpture

·         Papier-mâché technique

·         Throwing a cup on the potter’s wheel

·         Build a figure armature from imagination

·         Read a book of hand-building clay sculpture

·         Learn how a kiln works

Printmaking

·         Print a large woodcut of a person

·         Do a 3-layer etching

·         Do a 4 or 5 layer linocut

·         Understand how an etching press, letterpress, and a lithography press are put together and understand their mechanisms and parts

·         Memorize the process of printing a lithograph

Animation

·         Understand the methods of hand-drawn animators (not just the drawing part)

·         Understand and know by heart the 12 principles of animation

·         Come up with a technique for making short animations

·         Understand the relationship between weight, timing, and spacing

Photography

·         Understand how a camera works

·         Understand the basic process of printing a black and white photograph in the darkroom

Tech Stuff

·         Become acquainted with the basic functions of Adobe Illustrator

Excerpts from Robert Henri's "The Art Spirit" (1923)

"Cafferty," Robert Henri, oil on canvas (1926)

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life. (12)

An art student must be a master from the beginning, that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future. (12)

A work of art which inspires us comes from no quibbling or uncertain man. It is that manifest of a very positive nature in great enjoyment, and at the very moment the work was done.

It is not enough to have thought great things before doing the work. The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself. (13)

The sketch hunter has delightful says of drifting about among people, in and out of the city, going anywhere, everywhere, stopping as long as he likes—no need to reach any point, moving in any direction following the call of interests. (13)

Do some great work, Son! Don’t try to paint good landscapes. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting landscape looks to you—your pleasure in the thing. Wit.

There are lots of people who can make sweet colors, nice tones, nice shapes of landscape, all done in nice broad and intelligent-looking brushwork.

Courbet showed in every work what a man he was, what a head and heart he had. (14)

If the artist is alive in you, you may meet Greco nearer than many people, also Plato, Shakespeare, the Greeks.

In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother. (16)

Work with great speed. Have your energies alert, up and active. Finish as quickly as you can. There is no virtue in delaying. Get the greatest possibility of expression in the larger masses first. Then the features in their greatest simplicity in concordance with and dependent on the mass. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can. There is no virtue in delaying. But do not pass from the work on mass to features until all that can be said with the larger forms has been said—no matter how long it may take, no matter if accomplishment of the picture may be delayed from one to many days. Hold to this principle that the greatest drawing, the greatest expression, the greatest completion, the sense of all contained, lies in what can be done through the larger masses and the larger gestures. (23)

When we know the relative value of things we can do anything with them. We can build with then without destroying them. Under such conditions they are enhanced by coming into contact with each other. The study of art is the study of the relative value of things. The factors of a work of art cannot be used constructively until their relative values are known. (23)

Work should be done from memory. The memory is of that vital moment. During that moment there is a correlation of the factors of that look. This correlation does not continue. New arrangements, greater or less, replace them as mood changes. The special order has to be retained in memory….All work done from the subject thereafter must be no more than data-gathering. The subject is now in another mood. A new series of relations has been established….The picture must nor become a patchwork of parts of various moods. The original mood must be held to. (24)

All good work is done from memory whether the model is still present or not. (24).

With the model present, there is coupled with the distracting changes in its organization which must not be followed, the advantage of seeing, nevertheless, the material—the raw material one might say—of which the look was made. (24-25)

I think it is safe to say that the kind of seeing and the kind of thinking done by one who works with the model always before him is entirely different from the kind of seeing and thinking done by one who is about to list the presence of the model and will have to continue his work from the knowledge he gained in the intimate presence.

The latter type of worker generally manifests a mental activity of much higher order than his apparently safe and secure confrère. He must know and he must know that he knows before the model is snatched away from him. He studies for information. (25)

In the old days, when a drawing was begun on Monday and finished on Saturday the student who did not know now to begin a drawing “began” one a week and spent a week finishing the thing he has not known how to begin. A thing that has not been begun cannot be finished. (27)

By this I mean that you will make an organization in paint on canvas; not a reproduction, but an organization, subject to the natural laws of paint and canvas, which will have an order in it kin to that order which has so impressed you in nature—in the look of a face, in the look of a landscape. (28)