Still Life / Observational Drawing

How do artists use art-forms, other than drawings and photographs, to gain inspiration?

How can 3D objects push your 2D creativity?

LandLand - Dan Black and Jes Seamans

The work of illustration and design duo Dan Black and Jes Seamans, better known as Landland, pulls images from the hopes and dreams of the open land — a restaurant on the side of a highway, an amusement park lost between corn fields and rural small town USA. A circus of dust.
Dan and Jes have an uncanny ability to breath life, warmth, and tenderness, into their scenes of everyday living. A mass of dilapidated storefronts and billboards is filled with the charm of those citizens who believed it would all work out for the best. Their figures and interiors have been lived in. The Landland version of antiqued plains is lined with rusted billboards that remind you, ‘something real happened here, once.’
When Landland paints a local landmark they come at it from a point of reverence, of knowledge. they know what it means to people because it means something to them as well. Their work translates because their work is alive. It’s human.

Process of the STNNNG Benefit For A Totaled Van gig poster

STNNNG Benefit For A Totaled Van gig poster by Landland

Part 1 - Building the Sculpture

For this Drawing Challenge, you will be creating your own plaster sculpture of a combination of forms, geometric or organic. Construction of these forms will consist of cardstock, mat board, wire armature, etc., taped together, then covered in plaster cheese cloth.

You are free to be as creative with this as you can of course. However, if you struggle with what to do, here are some creative options:

Choose 1 GEOMETRIC FORM, and recreate it a number of times (minimum of 10).
Use the provided geometric form templates. Use a minimum of 3.
Think about lettering and font styles. Think of a word to create and make 3D "blocky" letters.
Just go Random!!! Cut out random shapes to be bent, twisted and combined with other shapes until you have a form!
DON'T OVER THINK THIS!!!

Formative Drawing Practice

First, sketch and plan your forms in your sketchbook:

Pick a minimum of 3 different white forms from the class collection. Observe and draw them in proportion and value.
Design your own versions of these 3D combined forms. Create a minimum of 3 thumbnail sketches of your ideas.

Part 2 - Summative Chalk Drawing

Once the form is constructed and dried, you will draw the form using white and toned chalk on black paper. With a single light source, from the flashlight of your phone, you will capture the lightest lights and the darkest shadows casted on and beyond the form.

You may also think about using the form itself as a drawing canvas!!!

Part 3 - Summative Fantasy Illustration / Drawing

Now that you've built from scratch a sculpture of random 3D forms, studied and observed the forms, and drew the forms as a still life composition...push the design further...

Draw a "Fantasy Landscape / Illustration" of your own imagination by using the same 3D forms you created for the chalk drawing in the same effect, or outcome, Dan Black from LandLand created with his "A Totaled Van" gig poster.

Drawing Criteria

must be an aesthetically "finished" composition - resolved in ink (value creating contrast) or color (material of your choice)
must "look like" your sculpture. There must be visual evidence you've taken inspiration from your original sculpture.
must have detail. Add in those little bits that will make the viewer go, "WOW!!!" - Impress us!
must create a sense of "space" or depth. Use the concept of foreground, middle ground, background. Take hint from the above examples.
must be drawn on the paper Manders provides.
Have fun with it!!!