Rachel 5/21/10

I'm really stepping outside of my comfort zone today with this sketch of a ballerina.

First off, i have low confidence when it comes to rendering effective-looking ballet poses. I never took ballet, know little about it as an art form (despite having worked as a stitcher for two nationally-recognized ballet companies), and don't enjoy watching it. So, drawing ballet costumes is like the artistic equivalent of trying to catch fish with my bare hands for me.

And secondly, this drawing is huge: 2' x 3'. This past weekend i bought a Tiffany style lamp at an antique store and the shade got wrapped in these massive sheets of paper. I prefer to draw on 11" x 17" paper or smaller, so this was another challenging element. I taped the massive piece of paper to the door of my studio and drew on it standing up. This sucked, because it made the markers i used get streaky quickly as the ink ran down the wrong way inside thanks to stupid old gravity, and my arm got tired windmilling around drawing on a perpendicular surface. I'm still feeling the strain of an overenthusiastic bowling incident from last weekend, and this didn't help.

I hate this drawing. It's hard for me to see scale and proportion on a piece this size, so from a distance i see all these flaws like how weird-shaped her limbs are and how unappealing i find the line quality of pens i like when i'm using them on smaller pages. Still, it's good to push yourself outside of what's familiar, so i think this was a valuable sketching exercise. I think i'm going to just recycle the rest of the big paper pieces though and go back to my favorite scale. Bigger = not better in this case.

In the interest of presenting something i *am* proud of (by proxy), here's an image of the costume i was attempting to render here:





This tutu and ballet bodice was constructed by Amy A. Page, a recent (2010) graduate of the Costume Production MFA program in which i teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The ballet bodice and tutu are one of the collection of projects that constitute the masters thesis in our program. The head of the program, Judy Adamson, teaches the incomparable tutu production methods practiced by the recognized master of tutu construction, Barbara Matera.

The students propose a tutu design for approval and then construct it--sometimes they do it in tandem with a company such as Carolina Ballet, but this year the two grads selected independent designs of their own choosing. Amy's classmate, Randy Handley, made a tutu featured previously on this blog, the second sketch down in this post by Jen Caprio from back in January! I thought it might be a fun project to sketch Amy's "ice queen" tutu and bodice, and use it as an excuse to try rendering a dynamic ballerina pose--that way, both grads would wind up with their tutus on here.

In retrospect, i should have chosen just one challenge here, and done it at normal familiar dimensions instead of huge. Not only do i see scale issues with the dancer's limbs, but also in the scale of the motifs on the tutu plate. To attempt some objectivity, it's ok, but i'm betting this isn't one anybody wants for a portfolio. :)