Here are some works of mine from the Foundation Drawing class; a mandatory class for all first year students at Pratt Institute. The key learning outcomes of the two-term mandatory class are understanding of the two basic elements of drawing: line and shade.
Instructor: Sophia Kayafas
SELF-PORTRAIT: Using only lines and cross-contours, we were tasked with drawing a self portrait. THe time limit was 40 minutes. I used a Conté crayon on the piece above, but other students used graphite and charcoal as well.
RIBCAGE STUDY: As with most art schools, the drawing course at Pratt encourages drawing skeletons to understand human anatomy. Grasping human anatomy paves the way for the comprehension of complex forms while drawing. I used compressed charcoal to draw it.
FIRST TERM FINAL: COMPOSITIONAL SIMPLIFICATION OF CLASSICAL PAINTINGS: The final project of the first term was to choose a classical European painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and simplify the composition with common objects. I chose the painting The Meditation on the Passion by Vittore Carpaccio. I simplified the composition with bottles, twigs, and mugs. The guidelines were to only use line with different weights to convey form.
HAND DRAWINGS: The key learning outcome of the second term was to understand shade. We drew our own hands in different gestures and shaded them with white charcoal and charcoal pencil to convey volume and form.
SECOND TERM FINAL: 5-WORD COMPOSITION: The final for the second term involved picking 5 random words and creating a composition from those words. My 5 words were "jungle", "rabbit", "fishing", "moonlight", and "flirty". The key element in this painting was shade, as shading was the entire purpose of our class for the second term. The story of my composition is as it goes: A carnivorous, anthropomorphic rabbit, which is a failed lab experiment, escapes from the lab, and hides in a jungle. It attracts fish to itself by being "flirty" to the fish. A lab employee is sent to retrieve the rabbit, which can be seen in the background. All of this happens in a full-moon night.