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. 

I can, of course, and do. I’m getting better at it. Those teeters don’t last for long now.

If you open the first page of notebooks or sketchbooks in my house you’ll often find them scribbled on, the depth of my intimidation echoed in the heaviness and desperation of the line.  The more I want what follows to be something special, the more fiercely I deface. I scribble in my silly, egotistical doubts and vanity. You want to see crap, brain? See THIS. I bet what follows won’t be come close to the crapness of this. And then with that over with, with that bottom line of crap established, it’s safe to start over.

I miss blogging. I miss writing.

So this is me scribbling all over my blog.

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).

The finished piece (on A3), I hope, brings together the elements the assignment was looking for. I tried to get a sense of depth, using the subtle impression of the cathedral spires in the distance and some very vague cloud shapes to show distance and provide a backdrop for the piece. Making the gate itself more of a feature helps to lead the eye into the picture, I think, with the use of the odd pot (I didn’t include all of the ones in front of me) and the lines of the wall  and paving slabs to pull you up the path. I tried to use a variety of marks to suggest the foilage and show the different types of plants growing. Using the pastels flat on the paper and making short marks helped to give the suggestion of brick texture and like the colours I chose – the earthyness of the browns and reds against the bright splashes of green. I think  I managed to get the perspective fairly accurate in the end, although trying to gradually reduce the detail in the midground means I’m not all that pleased with the buildings in the piece.

It doesn’t feel all that ‘me’ either – a bit flat and constrained although I am pleased with some of the expressive pastel marks and the light of the picture. At the very least I think it does show my progression and learning from earlier building drawings, which I struggled with so much at the time.

It was mostly a huge relief to get it finished and have a chance to move on. This has been a particularly challenging time for me, for many reasons, with my confidence taking a real battering and I’m looking forward to a fresh start with the new unit.

For the next unit, (drawing people!) I’d like to continue to try and use more expressive mark making in my drawings, and like the tree drawings, get something more of the energy and movement of the subjects in my pictures. I need to braver with the range of  coloured media I’m using and would like to do some more with inks, which I didn’t use so much in this unit but enjoyed when doing still life. I also really really need to start visiting more exhibitions if I can, and writing more about the artists and art work I’ve found – something I really struggled to do this time given time and mobility constraints. I need to get braver at sketching in public too which is going to be hard – it really affects my confidence and my drawing with it. Practise practise practise, I guess. I’ve just got to keep going. This unit has taken considerably longer to finish than I would have liked, so hopefully I can find a way to pick the pace up too, and make the most of the the term time before Kai finishes for the summer.

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.

(click to make images bigger)

Exercise: Sketching an individual tree

Quick sketches sat on the grass. I tried to work big and quickly and not be too precious with my mark-making, concentrating on the trees’ basic shapes and structure and ‘feel’. The bottom picture was most fun to do – it was a windy day in strong sun and trying to get a sense of the light and wind and movement in the foliage was good fun.

Exercise: Larger study of an individual tree

I loved doing this one, spending half of it outside and finishing the rest from photos. The tree itself formed part of a much busier background of undergrowth and scrub but using what I’d learnt from my landscape drawing practice I tried to pick out the most important features. I focused on getting the overlay of branches right, with the contrasting texture of the older, thick wood, with the newer, greener growth. I used a variety of media on slighted toned A3 paper – graphite and charcoal and pastel and chalk to try and get a sense of its feel. It had been the gate that had first drew me to the scene, looking as twisted and old as the tree and the same colours making it feel almost an extension of it. A few subtle bits of colour and some textured grass helped to anchor the tree and give it a little more depth.

Exercise: Study of several trees

My course had suggested colour for this one, but the scene I chose was dark and heavy in shadow and graphite seemed better suited in getting the contrast right. I really relaxed into this one, using bold, quick marks on A3 to give the piece some energy and working the darkest tones really dark. The challenge was depicting individual trees in such a mass of foliage and deep shadow but I think I managed it just about, and liked the perspective depth that the scene gave me to really draw the eye in – THIS is definitely more my kind of perspective, rather than the straight-lined kind from my building studies. Leaving enough area of negative space was tricky to make sure there were enough lighter tones but I think I got the cast of light pretty well – the shadows helped give a sense of this. The temptation to draw too many branches was strong – I didn’t want to lose something in drawing too many, but could do with finding a way of suggesting more layers of branches - in reality you could hardly see the sky, but I didn’t want it to be too ‘busy’, which in earlier drawings I found had spoilt pictures a little.

I worked in one, long, absorbed session and again, really enjoyed this one.

I would have really liked more time on this section, I was just beginning to get into it when it was time to move on. Some more time spent different, individual trees would have been good, working out how to tackle each type of tree differently, and again, seeing what difference the summer growth would bring. I’d also like to do some more drawing concentrating on bark texture, too – some silver birches I looked at would have been perfect.

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.

Exercise: Parallel perspective – an interior view

The ceiling of Waterstones bookshop in Birmingham, pencil on A3, which I had to do from photos in the end, because the doorway of the shop was not the ideal place to sit and draw! I did this without rulers so the accuracy is a little off, but I created a good sense of depth, I think, through the perspective detail of the ceiling.

Exercise: Angular perspective

Pastel on A3. I did this one sat on the grass round the back of St Chad’s church on a rare sunny day. Getting a bit hung-up on pencil lines, I thought I’d try just using pastel, limiting my colours to browns, peaches and green in the hope of freeing up my drawing a bit, and as a result, the accuracy is not great and it was all too easy to try and fudge some of the poorer areas  with blended colour. Still, it was a fun morning, sat in the sun, with dozens of ladybirds making a home in my scarf and the sunshine.

Ray Morimura 'Sakata Sankyo Soko'

Exercise: Study of a townscape using line

I was disappointed during this unit not to have got the chance to visit some exhibitions. I’d had a trip to see Hockney in London planned, and to see Lowry in Manchester, but my legs just weren’t up to a day in the city. I have started reading lots more arts magazines though, both in print and online, and I’m enjoying filling my head with lots and lots of beautiful pictures and new artists and looking at different mark-making techniques and styles and energies of images. One such artist I found and really loved at this point in the unit was Ray Morimura, who produces stylised landscapes, line-heavy with an emphasis on strong perspective.

Ray Morimura 'Mukoujima Koufukuji'

So for this exercise I tried to capture something of his style, using strong, inked perspective lines, as well as variations in contrasting, thinner lines to add interest to walls and roofs. I drew the main lines ‘live’, then used a photo to experiment with the textured detail. The lamp post set a strong foreground focal-point, but its statement is undermined by the other areas of solid black colour I used, which I think were a mistake. I just didn’t quite this one right, but it’s a style I’d like to try again in future.

Exercises: A sketchbook of townscape drawings and limited palette studies

It’s at this point my confidence was at its lowest. I tried hard to build up a range of sketchbook drawings, making notes on the conditions, what I found interesting and not so much, about the light and the shadows, possible focal points etc, occasionally using that to re-draw the piece into a more finished drawing, like below.

I was struggling, though and the drawings show it.

I tried introducing a little colour too, browns and greens mostly – conte crayon here, but seemed to lose something in the accuracy if I focused too hard on colour.

Watercolour pencil let me hold onto a bit more accuracy of line, but I got discouraged with this picture before I had chance to develop the background foreground more fully.

It was just a matter of practise, I think, and building up my confidence working out under public scrutiny. I definitely need to practise more with coloured media – while I’m now fairly ‘safe’ and confident with pastel, others are much less so and I need to be a bit bolder in experimenting. I also need to get used to do more quick sketches and not aim for perfect, finished pieces before I’ve done the preliminary work and thinking and information gathering, because it does help.

Exercise: Drawing statues 

I finished this section with a quick stab at a statue in the local park. The sun was high that day, which although cast interesting, strong shadows, meant I was squinting up at the statue I’d chosen and as such didn’t have that clear a view of what I was working from. Probably not the best choice in hindsight, but it’s one I walk past a lot and like.

I was so relieved to have got all that done and be able to move forward. Tree drawing was next up which I suspected would be much more my cup of tea.

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…

Exercise: Plotting space through composition and structure

(click to make bigger)

This was done in graphite pencil on A3. Here I tried to demonstrate a distinct foreground, midground and background with graduated amounts of detail to show depth, using the subtlest amounts of shading in the far background. I chose the subject carefully, positioning the gate and tree to one side and then using heavier areas of contrast to emphasise the shape of the landscape  and pattern of trees and bushes to lead you round to a single tree in the far distance. I loved doing this, it felt like a kind of magic, trying to get the atmosphere of the cold, snowy fields and low light, and get the right kind of mark making to depict the tree branches, reflections on the water and the low grasses. I used a tiny eraser to rub out areas of snow and long sweeping areas of grass which I loved the effect of. FINALLY I felt a bit more in control of my picture-making. Most of all the feeling of having learnt something, starting from panicked sketches and getting to something more considered felt wonderful.

It was good to have something I felt positive about under my belt, cause up next was perspective drawing which was to be a whole new (HORRIBLE AWFUL OHMYGODIHATEIT!) ballgame.

A contribution to this week’s Writing Workshop, by David, @theghostshirt

Escape

When I was six we ran away from home

my older brother and I, together defiant.

We ran, we walked fast, we escaped,

off to the duck pond, aggrieved and angry.

The duck pond was too far for me,

a place not on the list of those I was allowed to go.

I turned back alone, my brother older and braver,

he went on without me, as I slunk home

I managed to sneak in, the door was open,

quick to my bedroom, I hid under my bed.

My brother returned, I heard the commotion,

Where was I?  My mother demanded as he cried.

I was lost to her, the pain rose in her voice,

taken, abducted.  Where had I gone?

I heard it all from under the bed, listening and silent,

breathing and living and waiting to rise from the dead.

Forty years on, my mother lay, no pain left in her voice,

her last night with cancer, the flight, the final escape.

On top of the bed, breathing, silent and dying

I sang to her, held her hand, moistened her dry lips

That night she ran away from me, too far to follow

to be with my father, in places I am not yet allowed to go.

My brother came; we sat together, pain in our voices,

breathing, living, we watched as she escaped to the dead.

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!
_______________________________________________

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.

Today was the red of the apple you dropped as you fell asleep after lunch. It was the poems I read in the shade of the washing as you slept, and the shadows of clothes dancing a jig on the line. It was the curl of your eyelashes, and light on bubbly washing-up water, and the way the sun caught your hair as we sat eating biscuits in the field.

It was all the words we thought up to describe how much we liked our chicken casserole, and watching you eat seconds, and then thirds, and the noises we made when we were full down to our toes and the way we prodded each other to make sure there was no room left hidden behind our knees. It was the dozens and dozens of things we thought about and talked about as we passed our day, like if horses liked crisps (no), and what happens to water when it goes down the drain (it goes up a pipe to the sky and falls down again).

That was today, little bear, and it was wonderful.

A new writing prompt for you. Sorry I didn’t manage one last week. Ready?

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

Running away is our theme this week. You could tell me something you once ran away from, or find yourself often running from, or write about something you wish you could escape.

Or tell me what/where you wish you could run TO, what would be your sanctuary? Perhaps imagine yourself free of responsibility. Where would you go? What would you take? What would you do once you got there?

Make it about real life, or an alternative life, or make up a story, about yourself or an invented character. It’s completely up to you.

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!

Charles Dickens

I found some sun today, winking between the pegs, as I hung washing outside for the first time since last Autumn. The skin goosepimpled on my arms as I stood with bare shoulders and socked feet, daring the light, warmer, warmer please. And two things happened. I accepted the fact that I might not be well for a while, and I decided that I’m not going to talk about it. It could be months and pain is boring. The honest answer “I’m exhausted” to every enquiry into how I’m doing gets as tiring as I feel. And I’m not THAT person, as much as my body would like me to be. I’m just not.

My alternative to talking about it tends to be to just say nothing at all, cause it’s easier, isn’t it? And it may be that has to be a solution for a while. Quiet feels safe right now. I’m wrapping myself in it like a duvet.

But when I feel like talking, let’s talk about the patterns the spring sun makes on the walls, orange brick with shadowy alien street lamp invaders. Let’s talk about that picture I saw that made me make a noise and touch the screen with my fingers and count the days till I can down pencils and start painting. Let’s talk about what I’m knitting, or the pirate room I’m planning for Kai.

This silly fragile shell. I am bigger than it.

There are worlds in here that have nothing to do with how fast I can walk and THEY don’t have to sit still.