Ladder Acrobat

Warning: This explanation is three pages long in a word document. Proceed at your own risk. Also, the submission is actually a collage of images, so you need to click on it to see them.

After I finished crocheting my green blanket I wanted to crochet a portrait. I was watching my new Cirque du Soleil Corteo DVD when I noticed the ladder acrobat and decided to use him as my subject. I actually lost sleep over the blanket because I was so excited. (I would be more energetic right now, but I only slept for four hours last night, so I feel sea sick.) Because I couldn’t work on it in school due to the blanket’s size, I started sketching the Cirque performer in class, and that became its own project. I love drawing the performer’s face, but because the last adult male I drew/painted was some time last year, I was out of practice. Also, his face is really unique. That’s why I love drawing him so much. The build of his face makes for really interesting shapes and shadows. I draw him because I like the way he looks, and because he is a challenge. My weaknesses really show up when I draw him. I see where I start to skew images and why. I’ve been trying to fix that problem, but I haven’t made much progress yet. And because I’ve never drawn anyone quite like him, each portrait looks a little different. Some don’t look like him at all. It’s a little frustrating, but still fun. I noticed that there is another artist who did a couple of portraits of the Cirque performer. But we depict him differently. I try to make him look exactly like his photos, while she adapts him to her cartoon-ish style. Her marker-works make him look tired and sad. I don’t like to draw him that way, though. I like to see him smile. He’s very good at looking cheerful. It’s part of why I like him so much. However, he also makes a good ‘tragic face’ in some photos a friend of his took. I can’t draw them. The way they were taken causes all of the shadows to get washed out, so I have no reference points and I get lost…

Oh, and by the way: The pencil works were done with mechanical pencil. So, use that to assume the sizes. I use an average size sketchbook, but most of the images are enlarged in some way so you can see them.

A- These were my first attempts at the Cirque performer’s face. Unfortunately, I chose an unflattering image that was hard to draw, so they’re terrible. I didn’t look at the one on the left as a sculpture the way I do with my works that come out the best, so it’s very flat. I tried to isolate the shapes in the one on the right, but I condensed his forehead because I still wasn’t used to his face. In fact, I still condense it two and a half months later. (The first drawing on the left was done on February 25. That’s when my series officially started.)

B- These were my three first good images. The first two are my favorites, although I can see that the noses and eyes are a little funky. In the one on the right, he was getting ready to do a cartwheel, so his mouth was open and it threw off my image-understanding abilities, therefore the image doesn’t look as much like him as I hoped it would.

C- I didn’t use pencil on this portrait, I went straight to crayon, so I couldn’t erase or re-measure areas. I love Crayola. I had fun messing with the shadow colors. (Notice the turquoise neck shadows.)

D- These are on the same page as the B images. They’re just sketches of him moving about. I was trying to get used to his body, but I haven’t made much progress.

E- Some weird doodles. I don’t remember what inspired them. I might have been thinking about Spirited Away or something. Basically, I fused the performer with his ladder.

F- Another body attempt. This one actually extends the full length of the ladder, but I made his legs too long, so I cropped it.

G- More scribbley body practice. They look a little stiff…

H- I was trying to sound out the Corteo music on my piano. I’m not good with pitches, so I don’t know what the starting notes are. Therefore, I picked an almost random note and recomposed the music from there. The first line is the song that plays before the chandelier act. The second is the whistler song. I think it plays over and over in one of the DVD menus… I don’t remember, I try to get out of the menus as fast as possible because the repetitiveness bothers my sister. The third line is empty, but I wrote the notes beneath it. It was going to be the ladder act’s song, but I was having trouble memorizing it and I quit in my frustration.

I- A drawing based off of an image from his blog. (Which I found by mistake.) I couldn’t see it well, so I stopped drawing because I didn’t feel like it was going well.

J- An attempt at another photo from his blog. I spent two hours on it, and then I found out that I elongated his face because of how I was holding my sketchbook. The same thing happened to the painting at the bottom of this collection. I find it depressing when I work hard on an image, then when I step back I realize that I skewed it.

K- I did the one on the bottom because I was in a bad mood and I wanted to relax, so I played with the shadows. The one above was… Done by memory! I’m so proud. I traced an image of him to get the guidelines and I attempted to draw him using them. They aren’t quite right because I can’t trace and I have a hard time with guidelines, but it’s my best memory-drawing. I know I’ve done a few in some of my classes, but they look terrible. I remember being uncomfortable when I did that memory-drawing… I think the kid I had gotten in an argument with was nearby. I think I scrunched his face, so he looks thinner. Also, I was having trouble with the eye, so now he looks like a starved skeleton. I feel bad…

L- The two hat drawings were from screenshots I took off of YouTube. My computer’s ink was low, so they came out just red and black, so they were hard to see. The two drawings are off of the same screenshot. I’m not sure if they look enough like the Cirque performer. The image was dark. I almost didn’t include them in this collage, but my sister’s fourth grade classmates said that it was really good and that I should keep them in the group.

M- Another YouTube screenshot. This was from a performance he did with another circus. The image was hard to draw from, but still fun.

N- I made his body too small… I like the shading, though.

O- A very bad, quick sketch.

P- Both of these are from the same image, the one from his blog. I like the one on the left. The one on the right was done with a pen. I don’t like how it turned out.

Q- The same image, but this one was drawn on a whiteboard at my sister’s school when I was visiting her teacher. It actually consists of his whole upper half, but it was drawn so badly that I cropped it.

R- I was trying to draw off of one of my favorite Corteo screenshots again. I didn’t do very well.

S- The images that I based my blanket portrait off of. One is a small version of the screenshot, one is the tiny cropped version, one is the cropped version with simplified colors, and the clipboard has the grid I made. You can see how big it is by noting that the computer image that is clipped to it is a normal piece of computer paper.

T- I did this in two hours last night. I cut the yellow paper with an x-acto and glued it to the blue paper. The glue wasn’t cooperating, so it doesn’t look very professional in real life. It’s another image of the screenshot I like. (I didn’t choose that screenshot for the blanket because I wanted to incorporate his ladder.)

U- The finished blanket. It’s 60-66 by 59-67 inches, or 5-5.5 by 5-5.5 feet, or 160-167 by 160-170 centimeters. (Some parts are wider than others because I didn’t take the stitch size into account when I started to crochet around multiple pieces of yarn. It should have been a 5x5 foot square.) It weighs 6 lbs., or 2.7 kilograms, and it costed about 160 dollars in yarn. It took 131.5 hours over 42 days. Basically a month and a half, working about 3 hours per day. (Actually, I didn’t have yarn for a couple of those weeks. But I made up for it. One day I worked 14 hours.)

V- The undercoat and model photo of the painting I started on Tuesday. This would be called ‘finished’ if I were turning it in to school. But I’m not. Therefore, it is the first layer of colored paint.

W- The final painted image! It is 16x20 inches and it took 18 hours. The poor thing is skewed, like everything I do. It looks best at an angle. Therefore, the miniature on the left is at the angle, and the miniature on the right is as head-on as I could get with my bad camera aim. (It’s probably really hard to tell the difference. But that’s okay. You get my point.) The bottom image is the angled photo enlarged so you can see the little paint strokes if that sort of thing interests you. The facial hair isn’t as long as it looks in the painting. Cut me some slack, it’s my first painting with a five-o’clock shadow.

Now that I have been done with the painting for about a week, I'm noticing the errors. I'm frustrated because I worked so hard, and the portrait still isn't right. One eye is a little too high, his eyes are too small, his head should be tilted more, his forhead isn't right... Nothing's right. There is something wrong with everything. I'm very upset. As a painting by itself it is nice, but as a portrait it isn't good enough.

X- I was drawing again. I made the one on the left on Monday, I wanted to try that portrait one more time. The one on the right was done today. I think it took about two hours. The part on top of his head isn't just his hair, he's wearing a black hat. I think I might need to fix his left eye. (On the right side of the image.) 'Course, I still had a lot of fun drawing this portrait.


Oh, and I don't know if I mentioned it, but all reference images are property of Cirque du Soleil and the performer, so these copied images should not be reposted all over the place.



~~~~~~P.S. Heeeey, I finally met him. !!! I went to see Corteo on the Friday after Thanksgiving and he met my family and me and let us see the artistic tent and the acrobat dining hall, then he sat and talked with us for something like an hour. He didn't get to perform his act 'cause he hurt his foot, (He's giving me tickets to go see Corteo again after final exams) but he played his character and then after the show he gave me a ridiculously huge poster that was signed by a bunch of acrobats. He said everyone signed it, but I haven't checked. He went home after that 'cause he wasn't feeling well, I think we tired him and his foot out. Eeee, it was so cool seeing him in person, I loved watching his face. That probably sounds creepy, but imagine getting to watch your favorite actor shoot a scene. That's what it was like. But BETTER because I was sitting within three feet of him the whole time. I've given him the acrylic portrait and the blanket. The portrait is in storage in Montreal, and the blanket is getting sent to his mom in Russia. I'm going global!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P.P.S.
I've been to see him again. I get the feeling we won't be emailing/calling eachother anymore unless I draw him, but it's all right. I don't think our personalities clicked in the 'friend' sense. Watching him perform was amazing, of course. He did a flip off the ladder that he hasn't been doing because of his foot, then he slipped on the bottom rung of the ladder. I think it was because his foot was hurting from the jump. He gave my sisters and I pens, and I gave him a sketchbook I made out of envelopes with a drawing of him on it, and a micron pen. He has decided that the blanket isn't going to his mom, because it's too cool and he wants to keep it for himself. He kept calling it a rug the first time I saw him, but now he's been calling it a blanket. I'm no longer worried that he'll scuff his shoes on it. xB He and Corteo are going to Japan for the next, I don't know, 16 months? So all you Japanese/Japan-lovers: Go watch Corteo! He might not be with Corteo when it finally returns to America.

For anyone interested in Cirque du Soleil, they have a website. www.cirquedusoleil.com You can search for shows by location. La Nouba is permanently in Orlando, so if you're going to Disney, that one's there. I've been to see it, it's one of my favorites. I also like Alegria and Quidam. (And Corteo, of course.) And I think there are three permanent ones in Las Vegas? Oh, wow, there are six there right now. And a new show is starting in Montreal in April. This is exciting. So anyway, I recommend Cirque, and think that anyone taking the time to read this deserves to go see a show. xB My family says seeing Cirque live is better than the DVDs. (I'm a bit of a recluse, so I prefer DVDs, but other people get bored of them because they don't have the thrill of "HEY THIS PERSON IS ACTUALLY DOING THIS STUFF O_O," so go see a live show. D:< )