My Dad turned 60 on the 21st of last month. I promised him I’d draw his portrait as a special present and here it is, before and after framing.

It was a special project this one. I’ve only ever done a couple of portraits of Kai before so this was a whole new challenge and one I lost myself in, loving working the lines and curves and soft eyes of a face I have known my whole life, and love dearly. And I loved it, because it was challenging but not too hard, and I felt like I was doing something that is becoming part of my bones and my breath and that is beginning to feel as natural as picking up my camera, or writing words on a page, or brushing the hair from Kai’s eyes with my fingers.

I think I might be becoming a proper artist, and I’m so excited by the feeling.

Dad smiled WIDE when I showed him. Making something for someone you love and seeing the joy in their face when you give it to them is good, good, good for your heart.

Happy Birthday, old man xx

(Drew on A3 with charcoal and chalks and a bit of pencil,  in about three and half hours.)

Hello there. Part of the reason this blog exists is to encourage my own and others’ writing and in all my distraction getting stuck into my art degree last year I managed to forget that a little. I feel strangely guilty, like the blog’s lost its way a little, and that’s no good.

So, *best commitment face*, let’s get back to it. New writing prompts every other Monday, with a chance to share your work on the Monday in between. It turns out 2012 is going to be unexpectedly full of writing for me and I’m going to really need the practice – I figure I might as well take you along for the ride. And for any of you that started the new year pledging to do more creative writing, or for those that just enjoy the excuse, hopefully our fortnightly prompts will give you a focus and a reason to sit down and try something new. You don’t need to be a writer, or even consider yourself any good. It can be a couple of hundred words or a longer piece – the important thing is just to have a go.

For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, you can have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.

Prompt

 I wrote about January at the weekend and how the first month of the year is often my wash-out month, my false start, so with us moving into a more optimistic second month I thought that could be our prompt this week – second.

Write about a second something, a second anything. Does it come with the disappointment of not being a first? Or is second somehow better, without the pressure and expectation that comes with a first something?  Write about yourself, an experience, something in your life, or in your past, write descriptive prose or poetry, or, (and I’d really like to see some more fiction on here), dream up a story with ‘second’ as the theme. It’s absolutely up to you how you interpret it.

Now…

Decide how you’d like to respond, write your post and publish it on your blog between now and NEXT MONDAY. On Monday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then, if you can, take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comments. We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind and encouraging please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Monday’s round-up. And, of course, if blogging isn’t your thing, you could always use the prompts for private, off-line writing too.

Enjoy!

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Although I did do a bit of a gasp today when I looked at the date of my last blog post, it’s not actually that much of a surprise that January hasn’t seen me make much of an appearance here.

January is traditionally my nemesis month. One for head down, plough through, and this one hasn’t been the exception. It’s a keep your eyes on your shoes month, where big thinking and decision-making is limited to safe choices such as whether to have another piece of toast or put an extra jumper on. Light is low, pain levels predictably high and my immune system practically non-existent (I managed THREE itis-es in the space of a fortnight. GO ME!). I forget that this strange illness of mine, along with robbing me of energy, likes to play funny with the chemicals in my head to leave me demotivated and low and devoid of confidence and it’s usually late-January by the time I remember that that’s why I’m probably feeling so crud. And Kai’s not been sleeping either, really not, which, plus pain at night makes for a stupidly little amount of sleep each night, so the whole month has passed in a foggy haze.

But there’s been little islands of awakeness: a birthday, and gifts from friends and family that gave me sudden pounding feelings of gratitude and reminded me there were people out there who thought I was okay; an unexpected, arm-pinching proposal from a publisher which is all looking very promising and I hope to tell you more about soon; and a whirlwind 48 hours where I was transported to a temporary solitary oasis of sky and flat sea and low sun.

My hotel room lay just a short corridor and one flight of steps directly from the beach and I wrapped up warm and spent most of it outside, wandering up and down the beach taking photos, around the cliffy headland which I walked for miles, getting lost as befits a proper adventure, and finding a hidden cove down hundreds of steps. I watched the sun go down and the sun come up and said words out loud to the sea, and befriended an old man who sat with me while I sketched and told me I didn’t look a day over twenty one. The hotel staff couldn’t seem to quite get over the novelty of a young girl appearing there alone for her birthday, and I smiled wide when waiters in the restaurant appeared proudly with a gorgeous white chocolate-inscribed ‘Happy Birthday’ dessert. And I found a bench, high on a cliff, with the words “stay awhile and turn your thoughts to those you love”, amazed by just how many people I had in my life to think about.

So there have been good things. Many, really. And February is teasingly close, with daffodils on my fireplace and 4pm yielding a little more light each day. Time to start putting my best foot forward again, because there are Things To Do.

I shall leave you with some photos of Jersey, for those that haven’t seen them, and the news that the Writing Workshop will be back on Monday. I need the writing practice myself and its time to wake this blog up again after its winter sleep.

Here I am again, little blog. Onwards.

Wild Geese – Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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I’m not a fan of New Year at the best of times and I think it was fairly inevitable that I would find this one hard. The prospect of a Christmas without Kai or a significant other had left me feeling empty and vulnerable and prone to rushing into, and out of, things I probably should have been sensible enough to leave alone until I was in a slightly more together place. And so yesterday saw me a little puddly mess for most of the day, my pillows becoming a pathetically self-pitying Roshach test-like splodge of mascara on white linen, cross with myself and feeling hopeless and lost, vowing that the best thing all round would be to shut myself off from life where I couldn’t fall over any more or hurt anyone.

Until, that is, I thought, sod this. I’m not seeing in 2012, my brand new year, sniffing into my duvet feeling sorry for myself.

I don’t have to be good or walk, penitently, on my knees, like the words of my favourite Mary Oliver poem above say, the memory of which becoming, somehow, my one coherent thought through all of my silly panics last night. I don’t have to do anything new or different or reinvent myself or deny everything I am. I don’t need resolutions because I’m already living and loving and adventuring just fine. I just have to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves, because that’s who I am and that’s what I do best. I just need to be brave, basically, which of course is what I’ve always known. Silly girl, are you listening to yourself?

Determined nose-wiping turned into making a cup of tea and washing my face. And that lead to the impulsive one-click buying of some new books of poetry (I know, and you think your New Year was wild, huh? I bought POETRY). But that wasn’t enough. That was an everyday kind of recovery, god only knows I’m well practised at it. But this was New Year. I needed to think bigger, jump further.

So on the stroke of midnight I clicked the final ‘confirm’ on flights to Jersey in two weeks, my first proper solo trip away. Jersey, where my Grandma ventured on her own when she was my age after the war, and where I fully intend to see in my 30th birthday sat on a beach, wrapped up warm, looking at the stars, because I can.

I am not afraid of being alone because the world offers itself to my imagination. This year I will draw it and paint it and watch it and soak in every last bit of it and take it by the hand and spin it round and round. I am not afraid.

Happy New Year.

(P.S. Hotel has free Wi-Fi, so you’re coming too)

This Christmas I’m supporting Centrepoint, the UK’s leading charity for homeless young people and it would really make my Christmas if you’d consider doing the same. Homelessness in the UK jumped this year by 15 per cent from last year, and more than a third of this increase was made up of young people between the ages of 16 and 24. Using their More than a Gift service you could give a ‘gift’ on behalf of a friend or loved one to help a young person that’ll be spending this Christmas on the streets. From as little as a fiver, you could help provide a cooked meal, a book, or a warm bed for the night. Pretty much every single one of us could go without five quid’s worth of something to give someone who’s not facing much of a happy Christmas a better chance. Please think about it. If you’ve enjoyed my posts and tweets this year, you could even send the virtual gift on my behalf – my email is josie@sleepisfortheweak.org.uk if you’d like to.

Many, many thanks, and merry Christmas.

love Josie x

To finish this unit I had one more still life to do as an assessed piece, trying to draw together what I’d been learning.

As soft pastels and chalks had been my favourite coloured medium so I decided to go with them for my final piece. I liked the soft, impressionist style they created, allowing a combination of areas of blended colours and hatching lines.

The mark-making feel of pastel work reminded me of some of Paul Gauguin’s still life pictures and I took some time to study some to give me some ideas for composition and technique. These two were especial favourites – I especially liked the round forms of the fruit, the contrast against the white ceramics and including fruit both in and out of the bowl.

Gauguin - still life with oranges

Gauguin - Still life with apples and pears

I chose my subject – a combination of fruit in a wide, flat, white bowl and a jug and did a quick preliminary study using pastels…

I was pleased with the mark-making effect and the contrast, trying to get something of Gauguin’s style in there. I also experimented with what I could do with the background, rather than having just a plan flat wall. As a composition it was slightly boring though and the oranges didn’t give me much opportunity to explore tone on fruit, so I decided to swap them for apples and lemons, leaving one apple out of the bowl again for interest, and adding a few roses to the vase. Using a directional lamp, this helped to cast an interesting shadow on the back wall too. To give myself a challenge I added a folded, crumpled piece of material too.

I worked much bigger, on A2, and took more time trying to get the forms and shapes right as some of the oranges had looked a bit squashed in my first study. Thinking about negative space helped to ‘position’ the fruit in the bowl better, something I’d not quite got right on my initial study. I tried to use blended areas, using my fingers and a cotton bud, as well as some stronger, more defined hatching lines, on the fruits especially. Getting the detail right on the roses proved tricky – hard to get the fine folds of petals with pastels which aren’t that fine a medium, so I aimed to suggest their form with little areas of shadow and highlight. I’m especially pleased with the rose leaves and the overlay of lighter colour on dark - a bit like Hockney did in his iPad drawings. The cloth proved a huge challenge – so hard chasing those folds and creases and still get the cast shadows right. It saw me stopping in frustration one day and having to carry on the next but I got there in the end and I’m glad I included it – really helps to give the composition some depth and I like the way the unified colour of the roses and the fabric help to bring the piece together.

The shadows added enough interest to the background to allow me to leave it fairly neutral, although I added some white and grey hatches to give it some texture and stop it looking too flat. Using black very sparingly and grey colours helped to define contrast and shadow and give the objects and the whole piece a real sense of depth and 3D like quality, helping the main pieces stand out from the page, although I think the one shadow on of the rose on the jug is worked a little too dark. Forms turned out quite accurately – I’m pleased with the ellipse of the bowl which I do struggle drawing accurately, and the curves on the jug. In hindsight I think I could have maybe added a couple of extra pieces of fruit to the table, bottom right, as that area looks a little bare, but I was nervous about overloading the composition too much.

It was a real labour of love, this, and not easy. I lost my confidence with it a few times. Working so big is daunting and pastels and chalks aren’t that easy for working fine detail. It’s easy to smudge and loose definition. However I am really pleased with the finished result, mostly because it hangs together as a whole, complete picture, which is something I feel I’m only just beginning to achieve. I love the soft, fluid colours and shapes and the areas of shadow, especially. Looking back at my work from the previous unit and the exercises from this one, I could really see how much my drawing and my confidence had come on, too. It was so exciting to see my work progress and I really can’t wait for the next unit.

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Note: As well as sharing with you the journey I’m taking as I study drawing this year, these art blog posts form part of my degree assessment as I illustrate how I am working my through my course, what I’m learning and how I’m progressing as an artist. You’ll find them dotted amongst my usual content and posted more frequently during assessment times. I hope you’ll enjoy reading and learning with me, but if you’re more interested in none-art content then do use the navigation buttons to the right or my site map to have a look at everything else I like to talk about on here!

This was a tough set of exercises as I have no pets and no access to any really! If there’s a better reason for us getting a kitten I don’t know one, but I didn’t really get organised with that particular plan in time. So I had to improvise a bit and its meant I’ve not really done as much on this section of the course as I’d like – I’m spending time over Christmas with family with pets though so I’m hoping to add to this section of work over the next couple of weeks with some impromptu life sketches of sleeping cats and maybe some garden birds if I can get chance to sit outside for a while. I find it hard to work very quickly, being a bit fastidious with my drawing, so this will be a bit of a challenge for me I think. I’m a bit limited without a car as to where I can get to in the short times I have to work during Kai’s nursery sessions. I could do with dedicating a longer day trip when I get chance to a wildlife sanctuary or somewhere like that. Would mean drawing in front of other people though – eeep! Since outside drawing forms pretty much the whole of the next module, I’m going to have to get used to it though!

Exercise: Grabbing the chance

The one subject I did get to draw was my friend Suze’s lovely Boxer puppy, Moose. I used charcoal and chalk on coloured, textured paper which has always been my favourite medium for portraits and suited his colouring. I’m pleased with the muscle definition in his folded leg and the suggestion of hair on his paws and neck. Getting the folds of his lovely face was tricky, especially as a lot of it was hidden in the pose but I think I got it about right. I really loved doing this one and would definitely like to do some more pet portraits. Might be a way of making some money, you never know!

George Stubb‘s work helps me see how important it is to think about muscle shape and tone when drawing animals – his studies show how many animals are basically made up of different muscles shapes, overlaid with tone to show their definition and get a sense of their stance and movement. Stubbs seems to put intense focus into how animals are ‘put together’ – looking at their anatomy, and they way the positions and shapes they make as they stand and move. I guess really understanding animals in this way helps you draw them better and try and capture some of what makes them, say, a horse rather than a dog. Like the vegetable studies I did earlier in the unit, too, breaking things down into shapes provides a good starting point for drawing anything. It encourages me to look at shape first when thinking about drawing animals, helping not to get too distracted by fur and skin or feathers and features. Getting the basic form accurate first will lead to better-looking drawing when finished. I do find Stubbs’ drawings a little cold though. Depicting anatomy is only half of the interest for me – I’d hope to try and really get something of an individual’s character in a drawing too and sometimes I think that might mean sacrificing some of anatomical  accuracy, especially if you’re having to work ‘live’ and fast before animals move too much.

Exercise: Fish on a plate

For this one I had to overcome my long-held slightly icky fear of dead fish. I am freaked out by so little; spiders and snakes and all the rest hold absolutely no qualms for me, but there is something about dead fish that really makes my skin crawl. Something about those glassy, staring eyes, maybe, *shudder*. I was brave though and went to fishmongers to buy Sparky here (I thought I might be less afraid of him if he had a name).

I used a new medium for me for this one – watercolour pencils, and they may just have redeemed coloured pencils for me. I loved how, if sharp, I could define detail, and hatch in tone and texture on the fishes body and head especially, capturing the features of eyes and mouth and gills etc,  but then by adding water I could either slightly blend the colours together, or create flat washes of colour which really worked well on the shiny black plate. It felt a bit more like painting than drawing at times but I quite liked that mixed media feel. I think I did an alright job on the fish, getting the form and shape right and the subtle graduations of colour on the scales and the way his lifeless form ‘sits’ on the plate. The plate as a background worked well too giving a strong contrast to the pale fish. The table and shadows went a bit wrong though – I tried to add some texture rubbing through the wet paper to try and break up the flat colour and give a sense of the grain of the table but it didn’t quite work and detracts from the main composition and it does spoil it slightly.  Despite finding him a bit skin-crawly, I did find him beautiful and loved the iridescence of the colours and gentle feathering of his tail and fins. Next time I’d like to work with a bigger fish and maybe use inks so I can spend more time on the fine detail – I think I was just too nervous this time, small seemed safer!

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Note: As well as sharing with you the journey I’m taking as I study drawing this year, these art blog posts form part of my degree assessment as I illustrate how I am working my through my course, what I’m learning and how I’m progressing as an artist. You’ll find them dotted amongst my usual content and posted more frequently during assessment times. I hope you’ll enjoy reading and learning with me, but if you’re more interested in none-art content then do use the navigation buttons to the right or my site map to have a look at everything else I like to talk about on here!

Exercise: Negative space in a plant

Here I used my peace lily to do a negative space study – drawing the spaces around and between the leaves and stalks to reveal the shape of the plant. I’d found previous negative space exercises really helpful and I do think it’s improving my drawing. When I sit to sketch something now I instinctively look at the spaces first rather than the object itself. It’s a quite a non-daunting way to start looking at something complicated too – so easy to become a bit panicked by the detailed overlay of patterns and shapes. When I’m feeling really daunted by a piece now I will sometimes now do the negative space as a first sitting – drawing the spaces and shapes and then stopping and having a break or even coming back to it the next day. Somehow sitting down to a piece where the shapes are all laid out ready feels a lot more reassuring and I don’t panic so much as I begin to work in the tones and details.

It’s best to work slowly when working with negative space and I try to keep my eyes on the subject more than I do on the paper. You have to constantly stop and reassess the shapes your making and their proportion to one another. Screwing up your eyes a bit helps you to focus just on the main lines too. In the picture below I worked big on A3 and used graphite pencil, added some extra lines in the white space to define the odd leaf and stalk, just so you can see what it is, and then filled in the negative space with dark hatching to make the shapes stand out. I’m pleased with its accuracy and the fact that it fills the whole paper. I need to be braver and not worry about the edges of things getting ‘chopped’ off – it makes for more interesting pictures sometimes and makes the areas of negative space more complete, closed shapes and easier to relate to one another.

Exercise – Plants and flowers in coloured pencil

For this one I was going to have to face my nemesis – horrible coloured pencil! I chose a potted cyclamen to work with and decided to be brave with the background and sit it on a folded cloth. This was in A2 on watercolour paper and took aaaaages. Coloured pencil can look so insipid and building up colour takes a long time so it felt incredibly labour-intensive this piece. I began defining shapes using the negative space technique – trying to pick apart the way leaves overlaid each other and how the petals of the flower heads fit together. It was so hard to depict the pattern on each leaf as well as get the get all the overlaying shadows and curls right but I think I just about managed it, working lighter colours first and gradually building up to darker. The texture of the paper helped a little and gave the leaves a bit of a grainy feel. It’s not easy to make highlights with coloured pencil over darker areas, it doesn’t really show up, so I had to be careful to leave the lighter areas alone and not overwork them. It was harder to know what colours to use on the red flowers with the darker reds not giving enough contrast for the darker areas, so I used some purples blues and a touch of black to try and give the petals some form. This worked better in some areas more than others, I’m not sure I got it quite right. I was disciplined and spent longer on the background this time – it’s so hard getting folding cloth right but the natural folds and curves work well with the natural subject I think. I had deliberately arranged my light source to cast an interesting shadow and enjoyed making this a feature of the composition. It helps to fill up the negative space as well as give the picture some depth.

When I look closely at some of the individual details of this one I get a bit discouraged. But when you stand back and look at it over all it DOES work – there is plenty of contrast and interest and  the piece looks three dimensional and solid and it fills the page. Was a relief to finish it though, definitely not my medium of choice.

I was disappointed not to have had time to do some more plant studies but I needed to move on to the next stage of the module. I’ve really loved having a look at some of David Hockney‘s digital ‘paintings’ of flowers and plants which he creates on his iPhone and iPad and would like the chance to try something in a similar style using traditional media but trying to get the same kind of marks and colour – maybe pastels or marker pens or having a go at some mixed media work – combining pencil crayons and pens maybe. They’re so beautifully vibrant, just like the rest of Hockney’s work. He has an exhibition in London showcasing his landscape work and including some iPad drawings like these which I’m planning on going to in the New Year, as my next module involves landscape drawing. Can’t wait.

Hockney's digital paintings on the iPad

Hockney iPad still life

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Note: As well as sharing with you the journey I’m taking as I study drawing this year, these art blog posts form part of my degree assessment as I illustrate how I am working my through my course, what I’m learning and how I’m progressing as an artist. You’ll find them dotted amongst my usual content and posted more frequently during assessment times. I hope you’ll enjoy reading and learning with me, but if you’re more interested in none-art content then do use the navigation buttons to the right or my site map to have a look at everything else I like to talk about on here!

I was going to have to really get to grips with colour for this bit as the next series of exercises consisted of drawing fruit and veg entirely using coloured marks. I had a play around with media to start with, seeing what I could do with each one. Once again I hated coloured pencil (grapefruit, below) although I think I did a better job here in than in previous efforts. I really loved using coloured pastels though – I loved how you could blend to create smooth tones and graduate the colours (apple, below) but also make looser hatching marks (pear, below) but still suggest finer detail on stalks etc depending on whether you made bold, flat marks, or finer lines using the edge of the pastel. Working with pastels it was easy to introduce a touch of colour into the shadows, too, as plain black and grey often looked too flat. I’d enjoyed working with marker pens in the last module and again it was fun here (plum, below). You can be so bold and expressive, working quickly, though I found it was best to start with the lighter colours, rather than darker, and build it backwards because it was hard to overlay lighter colours on top of dark once they were down.

Drawing individual pieces helped me to start looking at the shapes that make up each object – for example the pear above is a circular shape with a rounded cone. Breaking objects down into their basic shapes does make it easier to draw them, so it helped to start thinking about drawing stuff in this way.

Exercise: Using hatching to create tone

Here I combined some of the pieces together to make a still life – the exercise was to use hatching in colour to show the different shapes and tonal values. I used pastel as I’d found that the most expressive in practise sessions and built up the hatching lines in different colours to give the objects their depth. I love working in colour in this way, being quite free with my hand movements and working quite big on A3, thinking about all the colours I could use to make up each object. You can make quite fine marks using the edge of the pastel, and even little dots and dashes, and I like how the lighter tones are as rich as the darker and how it’s easy to add highlights. The background wasn’t quite so successful again. I seem to spend so long concentrating on the objects themselves, that I run out of steam a bit by the time I get to working in their surroundings. Maybe I just need to make the backgrounds a bit more interesting – inspire me to work on them a bit more!

Exercise: Using markers or dip pens

Above are a couple of practises experimenting with using markers and dip pens. I love Sharpie markers (top left) and am really enjoying drawing with these. The colours are so rich and over-lay well. I have a tendency to be quite fastidious in my drawing, getting a bit lost in the fine detail, and working with Sharpies helps me to ‘let go’ a bit – you can’t help but make bolder, more confident, expressive marks and experiment a bit more. Doesn’t lead to quite such accurate drawing but does lead to pictures full of energy. I used dip pens in the top right, using a very fine nib to make the shapes and to create fine hatching lines, and then experimenting with a big nib, loaded with ink to create some bigger areas of colour. It was messy and ended up in lots of spoldges, but I quite liked it – adding some texture. I should have used thicker watercolour paper though, as the paper soon got too saturated and began to tear.

Using what I’d learnt I did a bigger A3 piece using a combination of Sharpies and fine-nibbed dip pen. I had found it definitely worked best to build up the colour from light to dark and love the effect of little areas of lighter colour peeping through the darker lines. I think the lined texture of the cloth over the blue shadows works well too. I then used a fine nib and black ink to define the outlines and create some finer hatching marks. Again, I could have done more with the background and made it a whole picture, but I was nervous about overloading the principle pieces and them getting lost in the background.

Exercise: Drawing using oil pastel

Urgh, I was nervous about this one. My few attempts at oil pastel had not gone particular well. I find them hard to draw with, like drawing with thick wax crayon, they tend to look a bit ‘spoldgy’ and I find it hard to blend colours. I chose a range of pieces of fruit to give me a good range of shapes and textures, concentrating first on just breaking the composition down into shapes and drawing those and then building up the tone and detail. I had to hatch the colour in quite carefully and the colours took a while to build up. I was pleased with the greener pear, and think I got the balance of shade and the highlights just right. The pomegranate was harder as it was fiddlier. I had to abandon capturing every detail and just aim for an impression of the seeds and rich juice – probably quite a good practise for me. I need to get more confident in suggesting detail rather than getting too hung up on every mark being absolutely accurate. Using a reflective silver plate proved interesting and good fun – shadows becoming reflections and I really like how that turned out. I’m slooowly getting a bit better at making the backgrounds more interesting and there is much less negative space here which is an improvement. Need to try harder to create whole pictures and not just little studies! Not bad for my first proper oil pastel attempt but I definitely need more practise.

To give me a bit more practise with oil pastel I thought I’d have a look at some works of Henri Matisse. He used oil paint, but in a thickly marked way and I thought I might be able to recreate the way he worked using oil pastel. His work was about really brave use of colour and tone, with dark shadow and bright highlights and making bold, defined shapes. He also used quite richly patterned backgrounds – tablecloths and wallpaper, which I thought would help me think a bit more about what I was doing with the backgrounds of my pictures.

Matisse Still Life with Dishes and Fruit

And here’s my attempt…

 I pressed hard and built the layers up thickly to create a thick, bright areas of colour and geometric shapes, overlaying colours to work them together and using black for the shadows and to define outlines as Matisse often did. I was pleased with this, and finally! A ‘whole’ picture with a decent background!

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Note: As well as sharing with you the journey I’m taking as I study drawing this year, these art blog posts form part of my degree assessment as I illustrate how I am working my through my course, what I’m learning and how I’m progressing as an artist. You’ll find them dotted amongst my usual content and posted more frequently during assessment times. I hope you’ll enjoy reading and learning with me, but if you’re more interested in none-art content then do use the navigation buttons to the right or my site map to have a look at everything else I like to talk about on here!

The next series of exercises in my natural forms drawing module was to look at grouping natural objects together into a still life composition, something I had started to do in the first module. I was to do two studies – one using just line, the second introducing colour in order to show tone.

Exercise: Still life using line

Oh how I loved doing this one. I chose objects for maximum line-y-ness (I’m claiming that as a word) and interesting texture, trying to arrange them in a way that would allow the detail of each item to stand out but so they still worked together as group. I also tried to start thinking a little bit more about the background of pictures – arranging the items on a thick piece of hessian I picked up at the market. I very roughly sketched the main shapes of the objects in pencil to get the composition right and then worked with two different thicknesses of pigment ink pen which I like working with when doing detailed work – much easier to control than dip pens. Looking at botanical drawings had helped and work on the last few exercies encouraged me to make a range of different marks. I concentrated on using the my lines to show texture and pattern – the ruffles of the mushrooms, little swirly circles for the broccili florrets, dots and lines to show the flesh of the open pepper, dashed lines to suggest the form of the cauliflower. Thicker, more definite lines helped to define leaves and stalks and rougher cross hatching to try and get the texture of the hessian and suggest some folds. I spent a happy day on this one, working on and off all day – I really, really enjoyed it and loved the finished piece.  Little bits of darker areas of shadow helped to give the piece some depth as did the concentration of line marks – marks denser and closer together suggesting the deeper areas.

Exercise: Still life group in tone

And now a contrast. I HATED this one! I struggled to understand the exercise notes in this one. It seemed to want you to use a limited range of colours to work the tonal areas rather than depicting colours as seen. So I had a go – using blacks and purples for darkest tones, reds for mid tones and yellow and white space for the lightest tones. It said to work fast and show some energy in the mark making which I tried to do but found coloured pencil really didn’t lend itself to this way of working. I have to say I really came to abhor coloured pencil during the course of this module. They seem to create such an insipid line, and you have to work for ages to build up depth of colour so spontaneous drawing didn’t work well. It was hard to show detail, even with a fine point, as the lines were so ineffective unless you built them up layer by layer by which point the fine detail had been lost. You had to press on so hard to make a decent mark so it felt very labour intensive too and I find it a wearing way of drawing.  Still, I had a go and although the grapefruit is awful, the banana and one apple do work a bit better. I guess it’s just practise but I’m really not drawn to this medium at all.  I think I was caught up too much in line, still, and could have done with working with smoother shapes that would have let me work on just the tone a bit better. In all the strife I also lost all energy with it before getting to think about the background so didn’t do so well there either. Urgh. I hate looking at it!

Maybe it was just that I wasn’t used to using colour yet, and that’s what the next set of exercises were to focus on so at least I would be getting plenty of practise.

Note: As well as sharing with you the journey I’m taking as I study drawing this year, these art blog posts form part of my degree assessment as I illustrate how I am working my through my course, what I’m learning and how I’m progressing as an artist. You’ll find them dotted amongst my usual content and posted more frequently during assessment times. I hope you’ll enjoy reading and learning with me, but if you’re more interested in none-art content then do use the navigation buttons to the right or my site map to have a look at everything else I like to talk about on here!