Assignment one

The following are six extracts from my learning log sequenced in chronological order (earliest first through to latest at the end). The extracxts include photographs of a number of final drawings on loose pieces of paper and some sketches from my sketchpads.

I have tried to make selections that give a reasonable representation of what I have done over the last 2 months related to the exercises and tasks for unit 1 of the course. This includes trying out different media, various concerns and learning points.

Because these are extracts from my blog, sometimes some of the writing will refer to thinking which is recorded elsewhere in my blog and not contained here in these selected pieces. If you would like to look at some of these references or get a fuller picture of what I have done, please refer to my complete blog which is on the Home tab of this blog site.

Extract 1 of 6 – From 1.1 Fractured and dramatic marks (5th May 2019)

Reflection on dramatic marks 1: I really enjoyed making this, even just creating the even background of dark charcoal, but I liked too creating the contrast between the dark fine lines of charcoal and sweeping curves lifted off by the putty rubber. Yes, I think charcoal lends itself to creating dramatic effects. The end result feels like a painting. I felt this before when using charcoal in the warm up exercises at the start of the course. I hadn’t realised what a great medium it is to use.

Reflections on Dramatic marks 2: As before, I don’t think the materials for this created as a dramatic contrast as the charcoal used in the Dramatic marks 2 exercise. Nevertheless it was fun to experiment with a mix pf materials this time, a 6B pencil, dip pen, brush pen and water applied with a brush. Again the brush added layers of further lighter grey rather than removing colour, but provided some interesting blurring and water colour effects in some places on the paper.

Use of the putty rubber produced much more subtle lifting off of pencil shading, but I feel the highlighting it creates is almost luminous because of the blurring around the edges of each lifted off area.

I enjoyed being free with the way I applied the pencil, shading the whole paper initially and then using sweeping bolder lines later. I also liked the mixing of media and how the use of the brush pen and dip pen made nice dark contrasting lines against the subtler greys of pencil,rubbed out areas and greys provided by the application of water with the brush.

Extract 2 of 6 – From 1.2 Contour drawing (7th May 2019)

Reflections on the above two exercises

Well, the images from each exercise are obviously quite different. In the blind contour drawing exercise the repeated overlapping shapes and misplaced negative spaces create a repeated pattern effect. You might see that sort of thing in a print or abstract piece of art. The images are less realistic than in the final version of the first ‘non-blind’ contour drawing exercise, though the shape of the teapot is still discernible and the practice achieved in the first exercise has helped surprisingly well when coming to do this drawing blind.

It did feel odd producing the blind contour drawings and there was a lack of control, but it’s like drawing with your wrong hand, the results are quite surprising and interesting I think, so you could use this kind of blind drawing to explore and develop interesting images.

The first exercise was much more controlled and more draughtsman-like. It was more about accuracy and felt more pressured. I liked both experiences. I liked the rigour of the first and the exploratory nature of the second.

I think the two could complement each other, in the sense that the first exercise provides the skill to produce the recognisable shape of an everyday object through practice. That then helps the drawings produced in the blind contour drawing still take on a recognisable and believable form, even though these are distorted.

Representation and Creation – further short extract taken from reflections on contour drawing and drawing blind exercises (7th May 2019)

In a way the exercises here also juxtaposed representation and creation, though the creation was more accidental and one of discovery through the blind drawing exercises. I feel naturally more comfortable with dogged representation. Creation is still a bit scary. I just worry that in pursuing freer techniques like blind drawing I’ll end up with an unrecognisable mess. But as I said, I think I probably need to try and challenge that through the practice I do over the coming months.

Extract 3 of 6 – Drawing larger scale (8th June 2019)

Thinking about oil pastels again and colour I was struck by the contrast of the bright orange of a shaving foam tube against the bright blue cap of a plastic bottle in the corner of our bathroom. I thought these glossy man-made objects might come across quite well in the bright colours of oil pastels. I also wanted to draw a lot bigger. I felt that I would have a better chance of mixing colours and trying different techniques with this media over a larger surface.

Below is a preliminary sketch in 2B pencil in an A4 sketchpad and then below that the finished picture in oil pastels which I did on an A1 sheet of fairly thick white paper. In hindsight, using coloured paper with a rougher surface might have worked better as shading could have then made use of the paper colour rather than superimposing this onto the white surface.

I think we look at scaling up drawings later in the course – but again, I think it’s okay to jump ahead if the interest has grabbed you.

I realised only right at the end that the persepctive isn’t right – the sink opens up a bit too much and the towel rail should in fact slant at an angle in line with the mini wooden drawers. Anyway, apart from that a big part of this was messing around with pastels on a bigger scale and it was quite fun trying to achieve the effect of different textures – the towel, the mini drawers and the sink. I tried different techniques – not just drawing pastels over each other, but also rubbing over these with my finger or thumb, rubbing away with kitchen roll, and scraping into the pastel coating with a craft knife.

I tried avoiding black for the shading but ended up using it anyway on the metal surfaces to create a more definite contrast and the effect of shiny, reflective surfaces. I found I used a lot of white and ochre yellow – I wish they just sold extra sticks in those colours – I found I often worked lighter colours over darker colours. The shading is not consistent across the picture – so that is something else I’d want to work on for next time.

Despite all the faults (or perhaps because of them) I feel like I have extended my use of oil pastels by creating this picture and would like to try some further large scale drawings on coloured paper next time. I’d also like to do some large scale drawings with charcoal, which I haven’t yet tried out for drawing since the warm-up exercises and practice markings at the start of this unit.

Extract 4 of 6 – Charcoal drawing (12th June 2019)

I drew my first charcoal drawing of still life below. It’s the same corner of the room I did in the previous pencil drawing. I did this one in charcoal over two days. It is on an A1 sheet of white paper and I used charcoal sticks and a putty rubber. I did briefly apply charcoal pencils which I received as a gift on the labels of the jars, but I didn’t like them very much. They were too hard and difficult to rework into the rest of the drawing, so I just used the charcoal sticks and putty rubber for the majority of the picture.

Extract 5 of 6 – Contour drawing and pen and ink again (15th June 2019)

So, I tried doing some (semi-) contour drawing of the same corner several times – here is the final attempt:

I then copied this line drawing onto a thick piece of water colour paper and then looking at the original scene in reality, added shading applying Indian ink with a brush and a bit more shading with additional lines using fine tipped pens. I’d realised I’d got some of the lighting wrong on the chair and added that with white chalky pastel as before – but regretted it – I would have preferred to have left those bits blank with the paper shining through. It’s a bit neater than the last pen and ink drawing I did. I like the left most corner best with the dabs of shading on the wall and pots. Any way, here it is:

Extract 6 of 6 – Kitchen corner again (22nd June)

Came back to drawing a corner of the kitchen again as wasn’t satisfied with what I had done before – again I had to make several attempts to get the relationship between different objects right. Here are some preliminary sketches I did followed by the final piece.

Some bits are still not quite right in the final drawing – the smaller ring of the oven needs to be further to the right. I quite like the application of tone, but it breaks down a bit with the bottles – it’s difficult to see exactly what is going on there in the drawing – I think drawing this bigger would have got round this which might have enabled me to pay greater attention to the detail of bottles.

I didn’t use any rubbing out this time to get across reflective surfaces, but just left highlighted pieces blank. I think doing the pen and ink drawings was quite good training for this.

I did the initial sketching out with 4B pencil because I liked the softer outlines this produced. I added tone with both 4B and 6B but bizarely found that adding final touches for detail and smoothing over tone with a 2B pencil worked rather well – particularly for the surface of the worktop. I wasn’t expecting that. I’ve always started the other way round, with a 2B or 3B pencil and then adding tone with a 6B.

…Looking at this again a little bit later, I think I probably included to much in the final picture. I found when I look at this now my eyes end up darting this way and that at the different collections of objects – better perhaps would have been just the boxes and bottles as in the preliminary sketches or just the boxes and toaster. I had started the drawing off with the boxes and bottles but drew them a lot smaller than in the preliminary sketches. I think this was because I had found mapping out the objects difficult in those earlier drawings and was worried they would spill over the edges of the picture – but in retrospect I don’t think the latter would have been a problem.