Alignment Assignment_Fourth Product

Hello everyone,

I feel terribly guilty that I didn’t complete the assignment on time. I’m not planning to list my excuses why I didn’t complete but I should mention that I’m really sorry. It seems setting certain time periods won’t work for me. Future assignments won’t be restricted by time. I was hoping doing this would push me to draw every day, but … You know what happened

Anyways, last night I have finished another piece which I am really happy about. I picked a really lovely Magnolia photo. I drew it by looking at it as I did on the previous ones of this assignment which took plenty of time. When I was confident about all parts looked set, I started coloring it with colored pencils again.

Colored pencil is a really nice media; I am having so much fun while coloring with them. I don’t have a professional set of colored pencils. I am still using little brother Ryan’s Crayola 24 pieces colored pencils. Since I am not completely into colored pencil use, I am not planning to buy a whole professional set yet. Maybe in the future!

While I was drawing and coloring last night, my background music was Coldplay Live 2012 album which is pretty amazing. I would suggest you to try to listen while painting. Princess of China is my favorite.

Here is my final product:

Magnolia bloom_2nd Assignment_4th Product_Tulay Yilmaz

It was a hard piece, there are some little parts that still didn’t really align with the original photo but I am satisfied with it.

Hope you like it! Now there is one more left to complete the assignment. I will try to release it as quick as possible. Then I’ll write why this assignment is helpful. Thank you for your patience.

Have a great day!

Alignment Assignment_Third Product

Hello everyone,

I have just completed my third product. It took my half day but it looked really nice at the end.

I am aware today was our last day to complete the assignment but I had a busy week, I couldn’t spend enough time drawing and I didn’t anticipate that this assignment will be this hard and time consuming. Therefore I am giving one more week to complete two new products. I am sorry for being lazy. I’ll try to make it up.

I picked Digitalis purpurea  this time. I accidentally found the picture  online and I fell in love with it. Original of the picture was painted by Arthur Harry Church (1865-1937).  If I need to describe his work with one word, it is AMAZING! They are so delicate, so accurate and so beautiful. I encourage you check him online to see his great paintings.

My drawing went so well today. Normally I don’t use guidelines that much when I start drawing but this time I did lines, I drew a frame, I did circles to arrange the places of the different parts, I kept my lines really faint and etc. This is an improvement for me because I normally start from one point and build up slowly which was always ending up with a good looking picture but not a totally accurate one.

This time, different than the other two products of this assignment, I didn’t fix the non-matching lines. I pushed myself hard to catch the accuracy as much as possible. I completed the whole picture, colored it and then compared it with the original copy. You can see below how it looked at the end.

Matching lines with the copy of original painting

When I was done, I colored it with colored pencil again and tadaaaa…

Digitalis purpurea_Reproduction_Colored pencil_2nd Assignment 3rd Product

What do you think? Is it looking good?

 

 

Alignment Assignment_Second Product

Hello everyone,

My second piece is ready. I didn’t expect this exercise will be this much time consuming but it is.

I have picked Papaver somniferum this time. It was hard and confusing. I still have the tendency to draw the things bigger than normal. The angle also ended up being different than the original. Instead of changing the angle of the pieces, I only focused on their sizes this time. Therefore, my final picture is slightly different than the original one.

Matching and unmatching lines and more

As you can see above, it was like a mind game. It wasn’t the best idea to draw all the lines on the same sheet, even being in different colors didn’t really help. Next time I’ll try to make it less confusing both for you and for myself.

After a few hours and with the help of little brother Ryan’s colored pencils, I finished my piece.

Papaver somniferum_Reproduction_Colored pencil_2nd Assignment 2nd Product

Since the angle changed, the top of the leaf remained hidden behind the flower. I am happy with it so far. I only wish I didn’t use Strathmore Drawing paper for this. Its texture was not the best for colored pencils. I need something smooth. I will use mixed media, vellum surface next time.

I am learning a lot during the process. I highly recommend you to try this exercise. Please leave your comments, suggestions… See you on the next one!

Alignment Assignment_First Product

Hello everyone,

I have completed my first product from our second assignment on a boring, gray, rainy day of San Antonio.

I should admit that I had questions in my mind how this exercise would really help me to improve my drawing but today I realized it definitely helps. I will gather all the benefits and publish them as another post at the end of this assignment.

I picked Tulipa sylvestris for my first drawing. I pasted it to a word file, and resized the picture. Trick is holding ‘Ctrl’ button while resizing not to distort the picture.

Then I started drawing the flower on my paper only by looking. I didn’t use any ruler, protractor, or anything else. I was pretty confident while drawing. It was looking nice and correct. When I was done, I copied my picture to a trace paper and put it above the print to see how my lines were aligned.

Matched and unmatched lines

As you can see on the picture above, black lines are my drawing. Red lines are the ones which don’t match with the original picture and blue ones are the matching ones. Not much, right? And besides my Tulip turned out chubbier than the original one and its leaf was way off from where it was supposed to be.

I put the trace paper to my side to guide me. I deleted my wrong lines and fixed them section by section on my paper. When I was done, I put the trace paper over it again just to see the end result. It wasn’t perfectly aligned still but it was good enough. Then I found myself coloring it with dry pencils. It wasn’t planned, and the colored pencils were not the best kind either but at the end it looked simply pretty. Here is the result;

Tulipa sylvestris-Reproduction-Colored pencil-2nd Assignment 1st Product

Hope you liked it. I encourage all of you to try and share them with me.

Stay tuned for the next one!

Alignment Assignment

Hello everyone,

After I explained my own style for line drawing, I wanted to give some time for the people who wanted to try my method before I set the second assignment. Hopefully you found it useful. I know it is boring to line draw compared to water coloring but it is a very crucial process for nice final products. Therefore, try to be patient. After a while it will get easier to sketch the flowers because you’ll get more familiar with the symmetry of the petals or the structure of the different plants.

I really thought over this second assignment if it had to be a shading assignment. However, I didn’t want to start shade and light games on our subjects right away because I wanted to make sure we all feel confident about our sketches first. If we can’t draw our plant properly and accurately, it won’t help to know how to shade it. I found this exercise on a book named as ‘The Elements of Drawing in Three Letters to Beginners’ by John Ruskin M.A. I didn’t read the whole book yet but it is easy to read and makes sense. If you are interested in it, you can find it online and download it free.

On this assignment, we will draw plants by only looking at pre-painted flowers. We’ll use this link as a source:

http://www.printspast.com/botanical-prints-baxter.htm

What we will do is;

1. Picking a flower from the link.
2. Clicking on one of the images we like and enlarging it.
3. Copying the picture and pasting it to a word document.
4. Enlarging it up to a point that we won’t ruin the quality of the picture or the details.
5. Printing that picture.
6. Putting the picture in front of us and starting to draw the same exact flower to our own paper without using any ruler or protractor.

We’ll examine the keenness of our sight and how accurate we are drawing without using any scales. It will also help us to extract our final product from a mess of lines. When we are done with our drawing, we’ll copy the picture we drew with a trace paper and put it above our print to see how good the lines are aligned. If there are lines that don’t match, we’ll correct them on the paper we were working on.

The exercise on the book takes it even further and wants you to go over your outline with a quill pen. I’m not planning to do this but if you want, just leave a comment then I can share the details for this part of the exercise.

For this assignment we will work on 5 different plants from the link I shared above. If you find another source with better paintings, go ahead and use them. I didn’t want to change the instructions in the book, that’s why I shared that link.

Time table. Assignment should be completed in 14 days.

We will have 14 days for this assignment to complete. It is plenty of time, so if you want you can draw more than 5 plants. Please keep your final products safe and clean, we may use them for another assignment later.

I am waiting for your drawings, ideas, suggestions and questions… Have fun and stay in touch!