learning from William L Maughan~michellechoongkhoo

after 2 days practising with my 2B pencil…..it is time to open up William L Maughan's book "The Artist's Complete guide to DRAWING THE HEAD" which I bought from Amazon.com a few months back……

Amazing stuff, simple instructions….
I wanted to improve on my edges and shadows because I notice that with 2B alone, despite trying to incorporate tonal values, it does not quite give me the effect I wanted~

This is today's effort from learning how to use 3 charcoal pencils of dark, medium, light and following William's instructions on page 26 "The Shadow Shapes and Their Edges"…..

What a great investment it was to buy the book…..

what with all the online tutorials, books, blogs, youtube… it is so much easier to find art tutorials that way than it is to find advertisements for local art teachers!

I sometimes wonder why art teachers dont embrace modern technology to really reach out to their prospective students? 

Holly Molly, there are more than one type of graphite pencils?

I came across this article by Charley Parker on Brian Boulton's art and read about a genre of artists who drew photorealistic rendering in graphite pencils….

I just couldnt get those Brian Boulton images out of my head even as I waded through other websites and art blogs throughout the week.

If you take a peek at the links below , you will see for yourself why Brian's drawings are so fixating!

"10 drawings" from Brian Boulton
"Untitled" drawings of Brian Boulton
"Drawing the anonymous subject" drawings from Brian Boulton

I mean, who would have believed that all those images above are not photos…right?

In the end I said to myself "Hell, here I am..just a newbie art student and how on earth am I going to know what type of art I like or can do if I am going to be disheartened by a page that had discouraging words or looks too tough an act to attempt?"

So I went ahead and gave it my best first shot as u can see above….and its nowhere near photorealistic. It looks obviously like a pencil sketching but it was exhilaratingly consumingly intoxicatingly engrossingly and fascinating enough for me to want to keep on trying it with photos of people on the streets!

During my attempts, I felt that no matter how I tried, armed with just a 2B pencil …I just couldnt get quite the soft shadings I wanted and it was rather frustrating.

Then it struck me that perhaps this "graphite" that kept being mentioned was a more special grade of pencil lead …

Today, when Ms Shia confirmed there are indeed many kinds/types/brands of pencils with different effects for drawing , this prompted me to bug my classmates to bring me along to check out the the art supplies store they had been talking about on and on …..that supposedly had anything and everything catering to all the fine arts students from Malaysian Art Institute (MIA) nearby !

Wow, right from stepping through the door and taking my push cart to browse aisle by aisle….indeed my jaw fell to my chin to see the whole array of what they kept in stock there….

Gee there's nothing more satisfying than going to the right place to get the right supplies to get things done better and hopefully the right way…..
Ehem, after 1(?) hour , it was with some controls that I only purchased those stuff I needed and not everything that I laid my hands lovingly on !
I'm so proud of my will power la, hee hee.

Here's some of my new found tools: graphites in 2B,4B,6B,9B,2-9H, red & white chalks/charcoals in light,medium and dark….

I even fell in love with the store's display of a dreamy polished wooden casing of complete sets of colored/watercolor pencils in every conceivable shadings imaginable but sadly the owner refused to even quote me a price saying it was not for sale~

Now nothing beats fanning my desire to acquire an object more than those casually uttered words : "NOT FOR SALE"….

oh nooooooo, I'm gonna be dreaming of that ultra complete collection of colored pencils for many nights until I find a way to somehow compile my own that looks as stylishly handsome if not more than the display set at Weststar !!!!

If you are interested other fancier items can be found and available at bargain prices ...that I gleefully grabbed too, all the while with Ms Shia's advise ringing in my ears "'Dont buy too much stuff ah, you may not need them"…..
LOLs, now if we only always buy stuff that we need where's all the fun in shopping leh? :O

tai chi hand movements in art? - lesson 3 at MIA, Art Centre

Ms Shia handed out to each of us, 10 sheets of white newsprint paper measuring 30" x 24"…..and the question "do u want to be free?"

Empty bottles strewn all over the desk and choosing either charcoal or oil pastels….our exercise today was to imagine how a blind person would visualize the shapes on paper and create a mass drawing of 3 bottles standing upright~ then in disarray...

"Loosen your muscles, draw the shapes as big as possible , use as many different strokes ….no repetition ok and stand up to draw if you want to"

Which we all did with much giggling as we put into practise our biggest tai chi strokes!

I had been dead tired this morning on account of our tiring journey back from Redang late last night.
This morning's free hand and fast paced series of different strokes lifted me …..
what a productive morning indeed as we went from mass drawing to geometrical to contour lines all within the span of 1 hour.
Can't wait for next week when finally , woo hoo we are going to get to play with color pencils~