Fun With Abstraction! (Due Nov. 24)

[Seedling]

Wyatt – I almost just now changed my title to “the dog’s bollocks” thanks to you. .

PaTX – your English is better than some folks who only speak English.

Enrigo – Terrific! I think this time you did a much better job at making each stage of abstraction strong in its own right. And you have nothing to be embarrassed of! And I bet this will help with your caricature assignment. By the way, one way I’ve found to make myself less shy about doing self-portraits is to do them with goofy faces. You’ll be forced to draw faster if it’s an uncomfortable pose, but it’s great fun, especially if you’re exaggerating the expression.

Iwantjelly – ROFLMAO! You’ve made my day with your piles o’ laundry! Looks like you had some trouble bringing the left one all the way to non-abstraction, but you nailed it in the right one. Funny, I’m getting the same impression as enrigo about that last one – the colors and the hard pixilated edges remind me fondly of earlier computer games. Any way, if you were to carry that image forward one more step, I would say go for the edges – soften them up here and there, maybe put in some soft highlights, and pick a few hard edges to emphasize. Wonderful work!

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Thanks for participating, everyone! I hope this was fun and edumacational. If you want to submit anything else in tonight or sneak it in tomorrow, I’ll give one last round of feedback. Otherwise Ilaekae should have a new assignment going up soon. Cheers!

[Ilaekae]

I definitely wouldn't call that too abrupt. It's a nice progression as it is. The secret of abstraction of this type is to keep eliminating all that icky little bitty stuff step by step until we end up with a image that is composed of only the primary lines and or masses of the thing we're drawing. The more complex the original is, the better the resulting abstraction is. For example, an apple...becomes a ...ummm...circle. Blah... A face or an animal or a bus full of drunken nuns wearing clown hats is just so much cooler to work with...

[bonaparte_jones]

Ahhhhh!

I've only had enough time to doodle around with this idea without putting in the time I needed to.

With that said, nice work everyone who did post their work. There is definitely some cool stuff (I especially liked Whyatt Thrash's woman from photo reference). Keep it up everyone. Hopefully I will finish something for next week.

[LeBlah]

To be fair, I did have this finished on time! Really! Exclamation!
But my internet threw a wobbly (again) before I could upload.
I think I might have deconstructed it a little too much. So, um, leeway, please?

[Seedling]

Hi LeBlah! I’m sorry I’ve procrastinated all week on giving you feedback. There’s no such thing as too much deconstruction if the purpose is for learning! I think it makes for a wonderfully amusing sequence. Woman melts into big pale thumb! I wasn’t sure about the change in the skin color, until my brain kicked in and noticed that you had shifted all of the colors into that funky pastel range. In the bottom left image in particular, you wrangled the colors into a nice harmony. I love that you used the shapes of the glasses and lips as focal points, and the chin melting away is a riot!

I’ll leave this up just a little while longer in case you have comments.

The new assignment is up here!