Scribble
I’ve always been intimidated by blank spaces – those gaps left between things specifically. They carry so much expectation. Nicely middled things, jostled either side by things close before or quickly followed, get to hide, easily overlooked by what came before or after. But beginning again, so much more than a first attempt which comes without a history to colour it, starting over comes with that pause before, focusing attention, gathering up the weight of shadowy last attempts and emotion and success and failures. All eyes on.
I’m paralysed by it. It’s one of my least favourite traits. Get me in my stride and boy, will I go, like a champion skier down a slalom whipwhipwhip. But chances are I’ve teetered on the top for an age first. I will fail, I will fail, I say. I can’t do it as good again. It won’t be good enough, and everyone is looking and I’ll look like a fool. I can’t I can’t.
Read MoreAssignment Three – a view through a door
It took AGES to find a suitable subject for this assignment, in which I needed to demonstrate all of what I’d learnt in the outdoor drawing unit so far. The brief was so specific – it needed to be a view through a door or window, have elements of straight-lined subjects such as buildings or walls, as well as natural forms, and have a strong element of perspective and depth. ARGH! Finding something that ticked all these boxes AND provided a viewpoint that I liked enough to want to draw was really tough. In the end, after much wandering about, Erasmus Darwin’s walled herb garden in Lichfield provided me with a view through a garden gate and all of the elements I was looking for.
It was a lovely sunny day for practice sketches. I tried to plan out the composition and which elements of the scene I should make a feature of – concentrating on the strong perspective lines of the garden walls and the deep shadows. I practised drawing out the main shapes and did some experiments with coloured media – I wanted to use graphite mainly with a limited palette colour overlay. I had initially planned watercolour pencil but felt safer with pastels and preferred the look of my sketches using them. I also tried to get a firm grasp of the perspective lines and vanishing points in the picture, knowing how much I’d struggled with these before, and found it was starting to come a little easier (it helped having a vanishing point on the paper I could use to work from).
Read MoreDrawing Trees
sketching in the graveyard
At last the weather started picking up a bit in time for this part of the unit and I had some lovely mornings sat outside in the huge graveyard down the road where I spend so much time, looking at the trees and sketching. I enjoyed just really LOOKING at trees, in a way I don’t think I have done since I was little girl when I used to be sure I could see faces in the patterns of branches, with every tree on the way to school given a name and a personality. This time of year was perfect, with lack of foliage revealing the deciduous trees’ structure and frame and I feel like I started to learn how trees are put together. It’ll be good to do some more tree drawing over the summer if I can, to see the difference a full coating of leaves makes to drawing them.
I love the atmosphere and energy of trees, without sounding too much like a hopeless hippy, which I probably am, and I loved trying to get a sense of that in the drawings I did. I love how every time and age of tree is slightly different. This unit only just scratched the surface really and I’m looking forward to much much more tree drawing when I get the chance – I can see them being a favourite subject for a long time to come.
Read MorePerspective and Townscape Drawing
Moving on from landscape drawing it was time to tackle perspective and start on a series of townscape drawings of buildings. I’m going to say this right from the start, I found this part of the unit torturous. The logistics of portraying accurate perspective I found difficult to get my head round for starters. I found it hard to keep a sense of multiple vanishing points, especially when they existed off my page, so I couldn’t use marks on my paper to work from. I experimented with using a ruler for accuracy, but drawings ended up looking too rigid and lifeless, but NOT using a ruler made even little mistakes throw out the look of the whole picture. I can’t get excited about buildings and it shows in every single line I draw. I found pictures based mainly on straight lines so hard to give some energy to. It was hard to get my mark-making right, and felt restricted by accuracy over style. The thing I love so much about more organic subjects is the fluidity and roughness of line, giving you so much more room for expression.
Working ‘live’ I also found problematic. I was struggling to find dry days to work and even on dry days it tended to be overcast making the light very flat and providing little contrast on the streets and buildings. Even tiny little shifts in sitting position could dramatically change the angle of your subject. You’d start drawing one area, then by the time you’d worked round the whole picture find that the perspective had changed after you’d wriggled around a bit. I had to keep checking my invisible vanishing points constantly, with every line, and like I said, was struggling to envision these in my head. Drawing outside in public places like this was an immediate threat to my confidence, and especially as I struggled so much to get it right, I found I was really beginning to lose my nerve, with every drawing getting harder to work up the courage to do.
So, yes, not a fan of buildings.
All that being said I think the series of pictures are understandably fairly weak. I’m a bit embarrassed showing some of them, but there we go. I keep reminding myself that this about learning, and as it was, after all these floundering efforts, it did finally come together in my final assignment piece which I’ll post pictures of soon, so it was worthwhile struggling though.
Read MoreLandscape Drawing (part 2)
It’s been a while since I updated my learning journal. It’s been such a tough couple of months. My health has been dreadful, childcare has been short with holidays and Kai off poorly, all of which has added up to tiny, scraped amounts of time to give over to my course and my drawing, trying to fit them round breaks in the weather when I could get outside to work. BUT I have kept going, albeit with confidence struggling, and I’ve managed to get another unit finished. Huzzah. I shall be writing up a bit about it over the next few days so my tutor can follow my progress.
I left off last time having started some landscape drawing and feeling a bit overwhelmed with the complexity of the subject. Looking at a landscape view there was SO MUCH to think about, a mass of focal points and tone and depth and detail, which I was trying to include all of. Feeling really out of my depth (postscript: I’ve just realised that’s a really awful landscape drawing joke. Boom boom!) I bought a book on landscape drawing to see if I could get some pointers (Drawing Scenery: landscapes and seascapes by Jack Hamm). It helped hugely – the book helped me see that drawing landscapes is a process of crafting a picture. Your job is not the faithfully reproduce what’s in front of you – it’s to create something interesting and compelling to look at. Your job is to lead a viewer’s eye in and around a picture. So I learnt about framing a picture and picking focal points and using to take the viewer’s eyes on a journey. You chose to emphasise certain things, through the amount of detail you give it, or by manipulating light and contrast in the picture. And I learnt more about composition in general – how the ‘rule of thirds’ (working in areas of threes, and, imagining your picture within a three by three grid position and positioning focal points on the cross lines) helps to create pictures more pleasing to the eye. (Why is that, do you think? It does seem to be true though).
I spent some time wandering round Birmingham Art Gallery looking at landscape paintings with all these new little bits of knowledge in my head and all of a sudden I found I understood what the artists were aiming for when they planned their picture. I saw how that darker area of path lead your eye HERE to THAT cottage and then the sweep of foliage and the way the fall of light in the distance had been emphasised lead you round to THAT group of trees etc etc.
And with all that in mind I sat down to plan my next exercise…
Read MoreWriting Workshop – Escape
Howdy lovely people, so sorry this is late up. Having a really rough few days (again, bleugh) so I’m going to have to post the linky and come back and add my own contribution later in the week.
Thanks for taking part!
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Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) – it’ll be open til Sunday night so if you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got plenty of time to join in. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! New prompts will be up this time next week, so I hope to see you back soon.
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