Flora OCA drawing 1

Around the time of this exercise I went to Epping forest camping with friends which was pretty great timing! In Ottilie’s naps me and my brother went out sketching, this first image was my first attempt – the difficulty with sketching in a forest is that it’s very difficult to get a view of the entire tree! I also found the quick sketch much more difficult and it turned out more like an observational study. It was brilliant however for awakening my enthusiasm – I’d really had very little interest in drawing trees before this but drawing this one I suddenly saw how like it is to drawing a body with all the bulges and peculiarities, something I’ve always loved.

Another really brilliant thing about sketching with my brother was being able to see how he drew – he’s a brilliant draftsman and he uses the pencil in a completely different way to me – often using it’s side which I hadn’t done before. The next day we went out again this time sketching a big tree on the edge of our campsite and I tried a different approach and was so pleased with the results.

I then had a go at the larger observational study and went for pen and ink,

I loved this, again I couldn’t get the whole tree but I built on the previous sketches and felt like I got it’s personality well with all it’s crags and crevices.

A couple of weeks later I found an isolated tree in a park and revisited the skethces exercise as I didn’t feel I’d followed it to the letter and wanted another go where I could see the  shape of the whole tree. I don’t like these drawings half as much but I did find them really useful for building confidence, understanding the structure and seeing my own development. Unfortunately I had to cut the last sketch short but the difference between that and the first of these four sketches is so vast I think it’s still useful to include.

For this exercise we were asked to try out variations of composition to find which view point we would work up into a finished piece. I went back to the sideboard and worked in conte mapping out the areas of light and shade and playing with slightly altered viewpoints. Here are three of my sketches – I actually liked the first a lot more than I though I would – I think it could make for quite a dramatic image of what is a very mundane view because of the blocks of tone and negative space, I’d like to try that in charcoal at some point. However because this was to be doe in colour I was more drawn this time to the objects on the sideboard and so settled on the last sketch. You can see that in reality the cup was lower but I wanted to make it a more prominent part of the composition so moved it up into the image. I also like the echoing uprights of the bin and the plant in this composition.

For the second exercise – taking this through to resolution – I chose to work with pastels. Although it’s a material I had almost no experience of prior to this course I’ve really enjoyed getting to grips with it and particularly liked the tonal still life in the previous exercise so hoped I could bring the vivid colours of my sitting room to life in a similar way. I worked it up in A2:

This was a real pleasure to work on. I feel like each time I use pastels I get more of the effect that I want to achieve – it’s feeling more like painting but with my drawing style coming through too. I’d found previously that I liked pastels best with a base colour so you avoided the white underneath and so with this picture I blocked out athe base colours in pastel, washed over them with a brush and water and then worked into that again with pastel. I was trying to be fairly true to life with the colours in this and I think I’ve achieved that, although in retrospect I think the colours are so bold that it might have been better to use a little artistic licence and tone them down a bit to make a more cohesive picture.

I LOVED this exercise! Partly just to come to the end of it with such a stack of drawings but also because I know that it’s drawings like this rather than the more finished or carefully composed images that I will come to value in later years. It’s the sort of exercise you should do once a year just to keep a record!

The first one I did in conte but wasn’t feeling it so moved on to pen and stuck with that.

The drawings themselves aren’t all that but they do give a real feeling for my home as it is now. My favourites are the mirror view in my bedroom and the view directly into Joss’ room with his instruments. Up until then I’d been looking into corners as suggested but it was such a lovely chaotic set up – crying out to be drawn! I cocked up with the window which should have been much taller but in some ways I think the off perspective allows the chaos to rise up on either side even more and adds something to the feeling, worth remembering that perspectives can be stretched for effect although also I need to keep a close eye to make sure it doesn’t happen unintentionally again. The mirror view I like precisely because of the mirror – it always gives so much to a composition with the added depth and repetition – and also because it’s my bedroom which feels to me like the heart of my home right now as both me and my baby Ottilie sleep there.. sleep being a loose term in this context! I will definitely work more on this room.

Looking again at these together I can’t quite see what brought me to choose the sideboard to continue with on the next exercises – it seems the least interesting choice, it’s an area of the flat that I am particularly fond of because of the clutter and it being the spot for a cup of tea so perhaps it was that, but in hindsight I think I ought to have tried something based solely on how interesting the viewpoint was.

I wanted to try to find a subject that was already pretty much monochrome and take that as a starting point, I did that but although I captured the objects themselves quite well I really don’t like this as an image. Partly I think it’s my colour bias and especially in relation to the subject – I just don’t really like these colours alone, I would have liked to give them a yellow or green background and the blue surface in particular really jars for me. Whereas in my previous tonal pastel still life the blue surface really added something against the other bright colours here it looks naff to me against the old enamel tin and wonky hand thrown mug both of which would look at home on an old scrubbed kitchen table not an unnatural blue surface. Had I made the surface look like a tablecloth that might have worked better, I could (and may) try that – perhaps with some spots to mirror the pattern on the mug and see if I feel better about it.

I’m also not sure if it strictly counts as monochrome – it’s blue and cream rather than blue and white but perhaps that doesn’t matter so much. I’m also I’m not really keen on the amount of space around the objects; I like busy images where your eyes are drawn to lots of areas at once and in trying to be a little more minimal I think I’ve lost sight of what works and what doesn’t. I’m not sure how possible it would be to totally rework a pastel picture but I might see if it’s possible, it will be an education even if it becomes a total hash. Anyway I am at least pleased with the objects themselves, that’s quite a nice representation of how they look.. if you can look past the background!!

..so I came back to this and tried changing the table surface to a cloth and it’s much less jarring to me now but I still don’t like it. The tablecloth wasn’t all that successful and I still don’t like the colours.