Assignment 3

For this assignment I spent an afternoon drawing my current favourite view from my parents’ outbuilding looking out across  Bishops Castle to the hills beyond, and then worked on the assignment piece itself back in my flat in London. Here are three of the preliminary sketches I did:

Charcoal, A3

Dip-pen and wash, A3

Dip-pen and wash, A5

I did a few other sketches but these were the ones I liked, I then played around with the composition in my sketch book before settling on a variant that used a little artistic licence to build height on one side of the page while keeping the church in the middle ground as a focal point.

I put the shapes in with charcoal and built up from there with wash upon wash of ink and finally details with dip-pen. I wanted to try to produce a softer more sensitive work than my other dip-pen drawings and was much more considered in my mark-making.

I liked what I’d done in the composition exercise where I’d repeated a rolling movement across the drawing and so I wanted to continue with that and make another soft stylised landscape. I really enjoyed building up the brush strokes and the way the ink reacted to that method, I came out of it feeling really good about how it had turned out but now that the picture is condensed on a screen in front of me I feel like the dip-pen isn’t a thick enough line to balance the brush work and perhaps a very fine paintbrush or a thicker nib would have finished the picture much more successfully. The lines are so thin as to be almost invisible here. The picture itself is around A1. Other than that I do really like ths, though I wonder if I could have kept more of my liveliness of drawing while still creating the soft rolling landscape.

Assessment criteria:

Demonstration of technical and visual skills – I feel like this is a competent drawing, I set out what I achieved to do with the marks I was making and was sensitive to the type of media I was using and how it is best used.

Quality of outcome – I still feel like I’m deciding how I feel about this one, overall I think it’s a lovely drawing but as I said looking at it on this scale I feel it would have benefited from stronger lines to finish it. I do really love the continuing rolls echoed across the drawing though and it does have a sensitivity that my quicker sketches don’t have.

Demonstration of creativity – I think this does show my progression in developing my personal voice – I’m certainly learning more and more what it is I like and learning too to manipulate what’s in front of me to give it my own style.

Context reflection – I didn’t do as many visits to galleries as I would have like to during this part, I did do a fair amount of research and that really helped me in my work but I don’t know if I wrote up enough about it – I’ve been all over the place these last couple of months with Summer taken up with the endless paperwork that comes with this period of massive change in my personal life and I’ve found it much more difficult to find the time to fit everything in – I think the paperwork side of this course has suffered because of that! hopefully come autumn that chapter will be over and I’ll be able to focus fully on the course.