Wednesday, September 10, 2008

advanced life drawing study fall '08

The Dynamics of Growing Old

Given the models we generally have access to in our life drawing classes, we are usually studying healthy young adults. I have (like others most likely) become all too familiar,and comfortable, with this seeing as I too am a healthy young adult. That's not to say that I have never taken on the challenge of drawing a young child or an elderly, and enjoyed it, but my plan for this study is to take these challenges to a whole new level.
I'm sure everyone can remember, at some point in their life, stumbling across an old family album on their grandmas bookshelf. Seeing pictures of our mother or father when they were our age can be a truly exciting and remember full experience. It is amazing, the physical changes one goes through in a lifetime. It is easy to track these changes when you have a year to year update laid out in front of you. My goal is to study these changes by drawing specific persons at different periods of their life, in hopes to learn more on how we change over time. With that knowledge I will take on the challenge of predicting the future or seeing into the past by drawing what a person will look like in 20 years, and/or maybe even 40 years. While I know there is no immediate way of learning how accurate I am, I can however reverse this process as well. I will attempt to draw what a person looked like 20 or 40 years ago, without the prior knowledge, to test my skills.
In this day and age we have computers and programs that can digitally predict what someone will look like in the future, however I believe that these studies will do more to help me learn how are bodies and features operate and transform overtime, thus increases my skills as an artist.

3 comments:

Miranda said...

This is a very neat idea. Who do you plan to start with as subjects? Are you going to start from family photos? Are you going to take into account genetics and lifestyles for your aging pieces?

Kalyn said...

I was just curious if you were planning on strictly working from photos or real life as well?
Also what style of portraits will these be, in an environment or similar to a school picture? Will you be using people you are familiar with or complete strangers?

Kalyn said...

I know I have already commented but I was thinking about your project since you just posted the new photo. I really enjoy the idea of researching age and its role of the human figure. I was wondering how these drawing are going to be presented and if you were planning on collaborating other elements into the drawings...? color, objects, and environment?