Drawing Animals
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!
Read MorePlants and Flowers
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.
Read MoreFruit and Veg Studies
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.
Still Life
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.
Read MoreDetailed Observation Drawings
There is going to follow a series of blog posts reflecting back on my last module of drawing work. This is mostly for myself and my tutor but feel free to have a read if you’re interested.
My second unit of drawing studies focused on observation in nature. Here I would begin to explore coloured media and draw upon the things I’d learnt in my first still-life unit. I was excited. I’ve always been drawn principally to natural forms when thinking about drawing and painting. I love the intricacy you find in nature, finding naturally-occurring patterns and shapes. Lines are more fluid, shapes are more abstract. Textures and colours are rich. And just the variation, too – hard to find too things in nature that are exactly the same, with every time you draw something holding the opportunity to create something absolutely unique.
First studies concentrated on detailed observation…
Read MoreNew Decade
In exactly one month I begin a whole new decade of my existence. Yep, bye bye twenties. I wish I could say I was sad to be leaving them behind but in all honesty I’m really ready to start a fresh page.
My twenties were really hard. Illness and fairly gruelling rehabilitation seemed to eat up so much of it and obviously relationships haven’t quite gone as I had planned back when I was a fresh-faced twenty year old dreaming of moving in with her boyfriend. But it gave me my boy, and I’ve grown. Not grown-up, but grown, hmm, I dunno, in? I am a different person after these ten years. A better one, stronger, more in touch with how I tick and with the world around me and why I’m on it.
It really feels like a new start, this. I’m excited. Excited to see what happens next and the people I’ll meet and what I’ll discover. I feel lighter, somehow, than I did ten years ago, even though I have much more on my shoulders.
The people at Journal10 offered me one of their ten year journals and I said yes. In it I have space to record a couple of lines every day, laid out day by day so I can see what I was doing every year on a particular day, all the way over decade. I think I will aim to record just one thing from every day. Something I noticed or did or read or something that was said to me. And then I can watch which way I grow and which way the wind blows me.
Thanks to Journal 10 for my new companion. It comes beautifully leather bound, with extra space for longer, continued entries and pages to mark down important dates and occasions. There’s pages to plan your dreams and mark your accomplishments each year and keep track of addresses and other important info. You can buy them via here.
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