Coursework, Part 4, Uncategorized

Part 4 | Project 2 | Exercise 1: Quick studies

I’ve been so looking forward to getting into this part of the course, and particularly exercises like this. There’s nothing I like more than life drawing and the quicker studies are my favourite! These were all done with the model in the same position.

First we were asked to do 5 two minute sketches using charcoal or graphite, I chose charcoal._MG_3717-2_MG_3718-2

I then re-read it and realised it was asking us to draw with as few lines as possible so I went a bit more minimal!

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Next was 2x ten minute sketches:

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Then we were recommended to try working from a different position and in different media. I worked first in ink, then conte and then oil pastel.

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Of all of these sketches I think my favourites are the slightly more minimal 2 minute charcoal sketches, but I also really like the ink.. I actually quite like all of the charcoals but I think with the ten minute sketches I’m less free with my drawing and it possibly suffers for that, though it gives them another quality which I do quite like – something smoother and a bit more blocky – I vaguely had picasso nudes in mind as I was drawing.

The proportions differ marginally from picture to picture but not by a great deal and certainly as I progress the difference becomes less so. The foreshortening on the left leg looks off in some of them but it looked a bit odd from that perspective in real life so I’m not too worried about that! I did really enjoy getting down the basic shapes in the more minimal charcoal nd ink sketches – finding that sometimes lines that are barely apparent in real life are integral to the weight of the pose and so play a bigger role on paper.

Assignment 3, Assignments, Part 3

Part 3 | Feedback

I’ve had my tutorial and am feeling positive about my feedback, we were in agreement about my strengths and weaknesses and her comments on my assignment piece made me feel like I should trust my instincts – if I’m not feeling excited about a piece then there’s probably good reason! With that in mind I’ve reworked the assignment piece and now I love it! I’m so glad I made time to have another go. We talked about possibly using collage which could have been good but I wanted first to have another go at my original vision for the drawing. It was lacking the contrast and liveliness of some of my other drawings – I hadn’t been able to get the effect I wanted with dip-pen on this larger scale and so I layered over the top drawing first in black ink with a brush, then white ink with a brush, and then black again and finally put in details with white ink and dip-pen. I’m really happy with the result, this is something I would happily put on my wall.

Here for contrast is the previous version:

Coursework, Part 4

Part 4 | Project 1 | Exercise 2: emphasising form with cloth

For this exercise I had my housemate sit for me wearing his kimono and we were asked to treat the figure and cloth as one whole. I sketched using line rather than tone and liked the way the lines built with the folding mass of cloth giving the cloth it’s weight. I may try this exercise again using tone and a different outfit if time allows though – I’m not sure that much of the detail of the figure was visible through the cloth – either in reality or in the picture.

Coursework, Part 4

Part four | Project 1 | Exercise 1: Drawing fabric using line and tone

I enjoyed this exercise much more than I thought I would. Having been looking forward to starting on people I wasn’t overjoyed to see that the first exercise excluded people..! However I can see it’s use and there was a real pleasure in experimenting with different techniques on the close ups. First I did 2 fifteen minute sketches of a blanket thrown over a chair – one using pen and one using charcoal and focusing on tone.

I’m not especially keen on either picture but only really because I wasn’t interested in the subject matter, I think they’re perfectly good representations of what it looked like and probably the second is more interesting and has more of the weight of the fabric about it. Then I went on to do 12 5 minute close up sketches – these were done in pencil over two A3 pages.

I particularly like how these look grouped together – they appear very sensuous and evocative in a way that wasn’t obvious until I stepped back at the end. The more tonal drawings give much more of the volume, depth and body of the fabric but I do quite like the simplified linear styles too – no good for showing subtle curves through fabric as I think this exercise may be aimed at but could make for interesting drawings all the same. I do like flattening our images and making them more print-like.

Assignment 3, Assignments, Coursework, Part 3, Uncategorized

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_mg_3327

Dip-pen and wash, A3_mg_3363

Dip-pen and wash, A5_mg_3376

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Coursework, Part 3, Uncategorized

Part 3 | Project 5 | Exercise 4: Statues

I really enjoyed this exercise, it seems like such an obvious thing to do but for some reason I’d never gone out to draw statues. I’d like to make a habit of it and  spend some time in the V&A drawing their collections, but for this exercise I took a sunny weekend and walked around London drawing at my leisure and it was lovely. I looked for statues that showed movement – I find them much more interesting – and tried to vary my styles to see how best to capture them. Here are a few of my drawings in conte and pencil, the first page of drawings were all 10-15 minute sketches and the last drawing (A3) was a longer sketch – more like 30 or 40 minutes. I used to draw in pencil like that all the time and I don’t so much any more so it was quite nice to revisit it. I quite like how the detail shows through the mass of lines but it doesn’t capture the tension in his body as successfully as the sculptor was able to. I also really liked trying a completely new style of drawing (bottom left of first page) drawing the outlines of shadows and then shading them – could be one to return to in the next part of the course.

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Coursework, Part 3, Uncategorized

Part 3 | Project 5 | Exercise 3: A limited Palette study

For this exercise I took the pen and ink sketch from Bishops Castle and did an A3 study in conte and wash using black, dark brown and burnt sienna. I can’t tell if I like it or not, I  keep looking at it and each time I feel differently. I think I was successful in creating a sense of depth and I really like the brush strokes and how the water has affected the conte – I wanted to retain some of the simplicity of style which I have done but with that I find that sometimes I look at it and it just looks a bit too basic.

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Coursework, Part 3, Uncategorized

Part 3 | Project 5 | Exercise 2: Study of a townscape using line

For this exercise I worked again on my parents’ home town of Bishop’s Castle. It’s a town on a steep hill full of ancient and very wonky buildings so lots of fun to draw! This drawing is of the high street and includes their house. I drew it over two A3 pages, first in pencil and then in pen. I’m not sure I really like the drawing style – it’s a bit too controlled and lacking in life but It was interesting to do a drawing in this format focusing more on the details of the scene. It gives it something of what I liked about Durer’s paintings – total simplicity in just recording what is in front of you.

 

Coursework, Part 3, Uncategorized

Part 3 | Project 5 | Exercise 1: Sketchbook of townscape drawings

For this exercise I spent a couple of days in my parents’ home town of Bishops Castle. They’ve only recently moved there but it’s a town I spent a lot of time in during my teenage years so I feel a great warmth and connection to it. I tried to vary the media I used and some were more successful than others – here are a few that came out reasonably well.

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This last picture is the one I was most pleased with. I’m so enjoying dip-pen and wash and something about the very simple wash and the car in particular seems to have worked particularly well. I often found myself wishing there weren’t any cars so that I could focus on the buildings but they are very much part of the scene so it was nice to have that aspect work.