Figure Drawing Course (I)

This is a beginner (to just beyond beginner) level drawing/sketching course that will focus on capturing both facial and body proportion. A detailed look and features on various angles & positions. Sketches can be complete on their own, as an aid for illustrations & animations, or can be used as a basis for painting or portrait study.

Figure Drawing Course (II)

This is a beginner to intermediate level drawing/sketching course that will focus on capturing both facial expressions, body language & posture, and the body in relation to layout as to convey the intended mood. Sketches can be complete on their own, as an aid for illustrations & animations, or can be used as a basis for painting or portrait study.

Figure Illustration (I)

This is an intermediate level drawing course that focuses on the exaggerated female figure for fashion illustration or can be adapted to certain styles of graphic novel illustration. Emphasis on the elongated figure and clothing variations including different types of fabrics & textures.

Suggested materials:

(not included)
A set of hard & soft pencils
A good eraser
A good sharpener
A sketchbook letter size or larger

Schedule & Cost:

Thursday nights from 7:00 - 9:00 May 6 to May 27
Saturday Mornings from 10:00 to noon May 1 to May 22
All courses are 2 hours once a week, for 4 weeks for a total of $110 paid in advance.
Cancellation prior to 10 days of course starting, 100% refund. Cancellation within 10 days of starting, 80% refund. Cancellation once course starts, 25% refund.

Where:

620 Millbank, near Stamps Landing, in False Creek Vancouver, adjacent to Claytek Studio.  Click here for map.

Contact:

778.235.2258 or email susheela.kundargi@gmail.com

©2010 Susheela Kundargi, Ziegfield girl "Dorothy Flood"

Not much to say about it except it’s great having natural light even on a dark rainy day and being right along the sea wall in False Creek people-watching at the same time! It’s mostly empty but soon it’ll be filled up!  For now, it’s got my recent paintings in it and to the right is my latest one.

Nevena will have her kiln & wheel in there too.  We’re really looking forward to being in there as the days get longer and warmer.

Below are some photos of the studio as it looks today - naked-ish!  I never had to turn the lights on despite the rain.  It was feeling a little damp but it’s April in Vancouver… need I say more?

Come by and see us if you’re around or visit us on Facebook.

Susheela's corner of the studio

my hand-painted sign

The entrance

April 1st is fast approaching and it feels very springlike in Vancouver!  Nevena has been throwing big bowls and plates and I’ve started making flowers like peonies and roses out of white clay (B-Mix).  We’re quite pleased with ourselves

We’ll probably move some stuff in this weekend and next week. There’s a lot to figure out as far as placement of clay related things and paint related things go.  The great thing is, we’ll have so much natural light, and we are right at seawall level with storefront access just in time for the best weather of the year!

Photos will come soon!

©2010 Susheela Kundargi

I just started painting these - excuse the poor photo quality- they are a series of images that were just black & white photos which I turned into duotones.  These are some of the Ziegfield Girls from 1910-1930 roughly.  I have many of them to do and I’m really enjoying painting them.  As usual, they are 24″ x 36″ done with acrylics.

We are still at the Beaumont until the end of February, then we will have a month off and then we will be in a part of Claytek Studio along the seawall in Vancouver for April 1st.

Hope to see you around.

©2010 Susheela Kundargi

©2010 Susheela Kundargi

How it looks on the web.

See Example
What you’ll need to do is create an image in Photoshop® or Illustrator® (See fig.2)  Make it simple as far as colour scheme goes; remember you’re adding text to this and you may have several similar text and image boxes distributed throughout your page - it can get very busy looking very fast.

You’ll notice, that I’ve kept the background transparent so that I can add a soft drop shadow.  When you export these slices, save the as “.png” so that the transparency transition from the drop shadow is smooth.  The “.gif” format doesn’t do this as well.

By showing rulers and dragging some guides down, you can decide where to make your slices.

fig. 2

Once you’ve done that make sure your layers are merged in order to export all the pieces correctly.  (See fig. 3 all slices are separate.)

You’ll notice that:

• the header takes some of the lower layer;
• the footer starts just above the curves;
• the ‘expandable’ middle section needs to be only a few pixels high.
  

fig. 3

Now, the trick with the code is as follows:
You’d think that you should be able to just make 3 divs, one below the other.  In effect what you’re doing is creating 2 divs, one below the other.  They will always stick together if you use absolute positioning.  All we need to do is anchor the top left corner of the expandable div to the bottom of the header-div.  The box images are the backgrounds to the divs.

The header div can specify height and width, with a background attribute of ‘repeat: no-repeat’.

Do not specify a height attribute for the expandable div.  As for the background on that one, use ‘repeat: repeat-y’ so that the little slice with repeat vertically to fill the area based on content.

Now, here’s the fun part:  create a class for the background of the footer (curved bottom of the box). If the footer is 35 pixels high, then say ‘margin-bottom: -35px’ so that it drops down a measurement equal to its own height where it can be placed behind text, a span, below the middle but within the same div.

Try it!  Here’s some of the code:

(The CSS part)

#box1head {
		position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px;
		display: block;
		width: 350px;
		height: 81px;
		background: url(box1head.png);
		repeat: no-repeat;
		}

		#box1body {
		position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 81px;
		display: block;
		width: 350px;
		background-image: url(box1body.png);
		repeat: repeat-y;
		}

		.box1bottom {
		display: block;
		height: 45px;
		margin-bottom:-45px;
     background-image: url(box1bottom.png);
     background-repeat: no-repeat;
     background-position: bottom;
   }

Then in the body type this code (ignore the text attributes for now):

<div id=”box1″>
<div id=”box1head”><h2>header</h2></div>
<div id=”box1body”><p class=”regular”>Aenean mollis scelerisque ipsum. Duis tempor. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse viverra, quam eget euismod tincidunt, metus tellus fringilla neque, ut tempus ante nisl eget ipsum. Donec feugiat augue. Ut feugiat. Integer euismod massa ut enim. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Nulla facilisi. Aenean mollis scelerisque ipsum. Duis tempor.</p><span class=”box1bottom”><p class=”boxfoot”>Copyright 2009.</p></span></div>
</div>

Enjoy!

• Milanka Bunard, Susheela Kundargi, & Nevena Tadic, Studio 16
• Ashley Fester, Studio 15
• Laura Zerebeski, Studio 14
• Kevin Davies, Studio 13
• Keith Weiss, Studio 10
• Marcia Martinez, Studio 3

Amidst the sounds of musical theatre rehearsing below and neither of us being sufficiently caffeinated to start with, it’s a wonder how he managed to create such awesome work. Here’s a small sample of his photographic wizardry.  I will post all these to my website soon.

Thanks, Andrew.  You’re a gem! xo

Paintings: Susheela Kundargi - Photography: Andrew Summers

Visit Andrew’s Photography Blog
Email Andrew

It was an extremely successful event. Please sign up for blog updates, those of you who didn’t sign up at the studio. We’ll keep you posted for when we do our launch and any other events.

The next event we will participate in is the Drift. Please come down & see us.

Susheela Kundargi & Nevena Tadic - Studio 16 @ the Beaumont. on Facebook