-Assignment Intro-
This assignment aims to ask us to draw a blind contour drawing and try to explore 3-D materials (ropes, cardboard, and metal wire) utilizing by practicing tracing on the contour drawing and stick it on cardboard without glue.
-Process-
Here comes my first trial (failure):
That is a motion contour drawing of a friend of mine playing cellphone. According to our assignment requirement, I copied it with tracing paper, then as a maniac with metal wire drawing, I simply skipped the first two process and started the metal wire first. I chose the iron wire for the first time and I bought both thick one and thin one. Even with pliers, iron wire is extremely hard to be bent or cut off. It wore me out to try to cut the thicker one every time. I spent almost 4 hours to half-finish the metal drawing–and it looks ugly. Then I tried thick copper wire from my friend and astonishingly, it can be easily bent with my bare hands. Therefore I added some little decorations on the metal-wire drawing and stopped trying to do with this material or this drawing. I failed in this trial with a 2 colored chaotic wire drawing.
Trial 2
Step 1
I figured motion is hard to draw with 3d materials and it is time-consuming. Thus I changed my main picture into another friend’s face and applied tracing paper to copy that picture from my sketch book
Step 2
I learned a lesson from my first failure–iron wire is so elastic and tough and copper seems way more gorgeous and way easier to bend. I started this time with the yarn drawing:
Pictures above are arranged according to the process I made this yarn drawing. I developed a way to stick yarns onto the cardboard–insert a drawing pin at every intersection of two ropes as shown in picture 1 (left to right). Then I started to twine the ropes on the drawing pin to make it work as a column. With several pins inserted into the cardboard, I am able to twine the ropes into a density of hair, shown in the second picture. Then pictures 3 is a almost-finish stage where I pulled out some pins to make the “hair” seems real enough. But in the picture 4, I fixed that since the “hair can be dropping and adding more pin with different color can not only stabilize the whole drawing but can also decorate the whole picture visually.
Step 3
After using ruler and knife to cut cardboard ribbon as raw material(picture 1), sticking cardboard to the cardboard is quite a killing question. After attempting with making a cut and ripping off a layer and engage, I found I can use pin to penetrate and “sew” it to make cardboard stick to the background with metal wire as line. (picture 2)
Employing this technology, I managed to build a face with cardboard and I made the content to be cardboard roll or cardboard strip. The side texture of a cardboard is fit to make hair. Picture 3 is the back of my 8*11 cardboard background, indicating how I “sew” metal wire and stabilize the cardboard. For linking up two independent cardboard strips, I simply applied drawing pin (picture 5).
Step 4
Finally it is metal wire time.
Taking the lesson of last failure, I chose copper with different diameter. Since the thicker one is a little bit hard to bend and the thinner one is not bold enough, I decided to twine two thinner wire to be a standard wire and twining is also the way I solve the linking-up process with two metal wire–just twine them into one.
Since for this one I have no background, I started my wire drawing with reference to the original contour drawing and picture 3-5 is the process I made the final draft. I also open the flashlight so that there is no shadow in the final draft, making it clearer in comparison to contour drawing.
-Product Pictures-
Step 5
-Reflection-
In conclusion, these 4 pictures are basically what I have done, how can it be done is in all above, and it is quite interesting to see a picture in 4 different materials. Cardboard seems more value-added, with shadows and highlight; the metal wire one seems shinny and the texture of metal brings the audience a warmer emotion than the first one which is in pencil. Also the angular yarn drawing also looks quite attractive with colorful pins and fluffy “hair”. Besides, for 3D materials, I think imagining and modelling is important since if you are not sure about the hardness of your material, it can cause messes as I have done once. For soft material like yarn, you have to have some supporting points to hold the ropes or it will collapse; for semi-rigid material, cardboard, we can probably manually change its shape a bit but it still needs stabilization; and for metal, the angle you bend the wire is crucial since what if you want to bend it right but you just mistakenly bend it up or down? It is quite annoying and it challenges my finger muscles a lot to keep the metal wire stationary when bending them.
