Flora OCA drawing 1

This was such an exciting exercise! We were asked to take two objects with reflective surfaces draw them tonally looking particularly at reflected light. It’s a really simple brief but I found it really daunting, I think I’m probably not very good at pushing myself and so although the sort of paintings and artworks that I like most often have quite a lot going on I don’t generally choose to do that sort of work myself. This was a really good exercise to prove to myself that actually I am capable of more complex work and I not only really enjoyed the process but am also really pleased with the final image! Learning from previous exercises I was more bold in my mark making but also comfortable with finer details, I think the only thing I might do differently looking at it again after a few days is to make the background much darker. It was fairly true to reality tonally but not nearly as competently achieved as the pot and jug and I think that had I used a bit of artistic licence and gone much darker I might have got closer to that atmosphere that Redon was so proficient at.

For this exercise we were asked to use four drawing tools and make four distinct grades of tone using criss-crossing lines, hatching and spots with a simple object as the subject to experiment these techniques on. The wording on this exercise felt open to interpretation as to how you present the work and so I chose to draw my object (one of my daughter Ottilie’s blocks) very simply in each different medium with another drawing involving a mix of mediums and styles to look both at how different mediums compare and how different combinations of styles could be used together.

Because of my choice of object and the way I went about this exercise the drawings ended up more like simplified illustrations – I’m not sure if this was the intention but I did really enjoy the opportunity to draw in a different style and to think about how pattern might be incorporated into further work. The combination of styles worked better than I had envisaged and I’d definitely like to follow that up in another work at some point.

The second part of the exercise was to place a group of simple objects and do a very loose drawing and then work fast using hatching to give tonal shadows and make the sketches more believable as objects. I did as instructed but I think after the slower more deliberate mark making of the first part of the exercise I lost my flow for hatching and the resulting image doesn’t do anything for me as a drawing, though it did at least go to show how quickly you can add three dimensionality to a drawing.

For this exercise we were asked to take two simple shaped objects together lit from one side and then draw them focusing on tones – first blocking in the mid-tones and then light and dark progressing to include all the fine details. I wanted to continue working with charcoal to see how I could progress with that medium and give it more depth. I did a quick sketch first to warm up and get the feel of the general areas of light and dark on the objects and then went on to complete the exercise, again on A2.

I’m really pleased with how this turned out, I hadn’t really used charcoal in this way before or ever spent this amount of time on a charcoal image preferring to use charcoal just for quick sketching in life drawing and I also hadn’t used putty in this way before. It took me a little while to get the hang of the putty and so there are a couple of areas where I overworked it and then wasn’t able to get quite the effect I wanted but once I’d got the hang of it it I really enjoyed it and felt it added the depth that had been missing from the picture before. Some of the lines that give the dimensions of the objects aren’t perfect and that could be worked on but it does give the feeling and the weight of the objects which was my primary focus carrying on from the previous exercises.

We were asked to choose at least six objects of different sizes and shapes and loosely describe the collection using one colour. I used charcoal having enjoyed working with it in the previous exercises and worked on an A2 sheet not a dissimilar size from the group of objects themselves.

I drew sections of the arrangement from three viewpoints and found that as I worked my drawing became more linear and bold as I became more confident with the medium. I prefer the bolder slightly more simplified drawings – worth remembering to try to do warm up sketches in future to build confidence before embarking on an exercise. The more linear drawings worked particularly well for the black plastic bag and it could be a good subject to go back to and draw on its own to build up that style. The small knitted bear I included thinking that it would be a difficult texture to translate onto paper and I don’t think that was particularly successful, though it gives something of the feeling of it.

For this exercise I took four textures from around my home and depicted each one using frottage, pencil drawing and ink. The textures I used were wood, the underside of lino, a woven plant pot and a decorative tin bowl.

I was interested in which medium would best articulate the feeling of the texture rather give the most accurate depiction. I had expected frottage to give a more immediate feeling of the textures but this wasn’t really the case, in all except wood the feeling of the texture comes across really well in the more simplified ink pictures, as well I think as the more accurate detailed pencil drawings. I particularly like the repeated patterns of the woven plant pot and underside of lino, these would look good scaled up – I can imagine using them as an element of a big colourful screenprint at some point!

For this exercise we were asked to spend time inhabiting four different emotions one at a time and with each emotion creating four non-objective images using four mediums; in my case charcoal, ink and a stick, pastel and marker pen.

The emotions I worked with were calm, anger, joy and grief. I found this exercise immediately educational as I initially set out to work on calm and though I spent a good amount of time focusing on that emotion I got half way through and realised I was way off the mark. I’ve just been through a separation from my husband and so this is a time of very marked emotions for me and however much I tried I was I couldn’t on that particular day reach the level of calm required. I also had the radio playing and although the music had been reasonably calm when I started by the time I stopped it was playing really upbeat dance tunes! The resulting images were all over the place, it was a bit of a crash course in the importance of environmental factors as well as taking note of your own emotional state and working with rather than against that.

Here is my initial attempt that I abandoned:

A couple of days later I came back to it on a day when I was feeling completely on top of everything, I switched off the radio and put on a specific playlist, gave myself a few minutes to wind down and tried again. Music really helped and I used that as a tool for each of the emotions.

Calm

Anger

Joy

Grief

I was struck afterwards by how unidentifiable some of the images were; joy for example was so present while I was creating those images but in looking at them from the outside the majority of them could just as easily be said to represent anger, calm or grief! The medium affected the images greatly too; charcoal seemed to portray the emotions best in all except joy for which I think marker pen is the only image that really conveys any sense of joy. I really enjoyed working with ink and stick too and love how those images came out, perhaps not quite as recognisable as those emotions but more successful as finished artworks. The least successful in every case was the oil pastel which is not a medium I would have chosen although it worked to some extent for anger.

This exercise again forced me to work in abstraction and I loved the freedom that came with that, I would like to take some of these images as starting points for future studies  creating a new series of abstract images based around emotion or perhaps a series looking at separation and the emotions that brings up.

I chose to use rice on a baking sheet to create my temporary drawing and really enjoyed the unpredictability that the surface gave – akin to iron filings reacting to a magnet. It was a lovely warm up to push me straight into in a more abstract direction than I would usually go, and there was a sense of freedom in knowing that it wouldn’t be permanent.

I really like the pattern created here and would like to revisit it later it in a different medium.