Ashley Weekes, Q2, Artist Statement

Originally I was suppose to work with recycled items to develop a work of art, instead I tried my hand at a skill that I've been working on for awhile, which is drawing. I've been frequently taking art classes on Saturday so I recreated some pieces and tried to improve some. Mainly my focus for my this art project was to build on skill that I've been developing. I worked with charcoal, pencil, pastels and toned paper to experiment with the different types of textures and shades to work with when drawing figures or still life.

Some of my drawings are recognizable as some of disney's famous characters. These are just some sketches in my book that I've been working on to give my hand practice at drawing different characters. I know the creativeness isn't necessarily there mimicking a picture, but I find it great practice when it comes to drawing cartoons. It helps to see the simple shapes in the characters so drawing comes more fluently when trying to draw what you see.

In my art classes we had nude models so there are two unfinished figure drawings where I worked with charcoal and shading in the dark spaces. When figure drawing it came natural because my hand has become accustomed to drawing the shape within a figure itself, in trying to give the drawing dimension I had to focus on lighting and the gray scale to make the figure pop.

I worked with pastels for the first time drawing a pitcher, a wine bottle and some squashes I didn't get very far in my design, but I've very pleased with what I have so far. This was very different from using charcoal because black wasn't the only highlight color to make the objects pop out, we had blues for yellows and oranges to figures stand out.

My 2nd quarter project was a simple back to the basics of drawing, with few sketches, and side experiments. The practice will do me well in the future for our third quarter assignments.