Like a lot of the other activities, drawing the monkey felt like a large overwhelming task. I have learned that I am a very concrete thinker and that has translated to my art. While drawing the monkey, I kept getting frustrated that it did not look exactly like exactly like it. I didn’t want to have to focus on perspective, so I decided to draw the monkey from the side. This allowed me to focus on the different shapes I saw in the figure. It was difficult drawing the legs and I found I had some trouble with the proportions. I also tried to incorporate some shading to match what I saw on the subject. Next I drew the monkey’s face. I wanted to give a close-up look at his face and play with the idea of using a dark utensil on black paper. The face was originally all drawn in black, but I brought in white chalk to help define the different parts of the face. The middle of the face was slow shading of the chalk on it’s side while the rest of the shading are quick, thin lines on the edge of the utensil. The last drawing was a quick drawing of the monkey’s legs, the area and perspective I wanted to originally avoid. For this very quick drawing, I focused on shapes and proportions and used a different, chalk-like material.
These drawing explorations focused on a few new materials and concepts. I had not used the clear plastic material to draw on and wanted to experiment using to different canvases to convey my thought. Without the plastic, it is a non-descript profile, but with the plastic, it starts to come alive. I used oil pastels on the plastic. They were smooth and easy to create textures and lines. The other exploration used watercolor pencils. I wanted to experiment with these new pencils and water. After putting water on the colorful spots, I let it drip. I then tried to print the image onto a blank piece of white paper. Not a lot of the color transferred. I had to keep adding water and keep pressing down the paper to get a very dull layer of color on the paper.
process and structure 