Posts Tagged "art blog"
Giant heads and conkers – still life assessment pieces
I’m busy cracking on with my next module, but I thought I’d post the finished assessment pieces from my last one for my learning journal. The brief was a series of studies on still-life subjects, one man made, one natural, culminating in two finished pieces. It’s amazing how much you learn from drawing something over and over again. Change the arrangement, change the light source, change the medium and seeing what works and what doesn’t… The natural pieces are much more my sort of thing and I enjoyed these a million times more, and I think it shows too, cause they’re better drawings and much more full of personality and ‘me’. Anyway. Here they are:
Read MoreTexture
Having tackled line, and light, tone and composition, I now got to explore how to depict an object’s texture through drawing – that is, how to describe its surface using marks and lines.
And, ohhh now we’re talking. Now we’re starting to get into the really creative kind of drawing – looking at something and thinking “how can I relate the feel of that something onto this page”. I know that when I start to study painting next year that this is what I’ll love most. The texture of something says something about its energy, and it’s the combination of a texture’s fine detail and trying to capture the ‘feel’ of a piece that I enjoy drawing and painting most.
Read MoreStill Life part 2: negative space
negative space exercise
Now this was a useful one – teaching you to focus on the spaces around and between objects. Using the line of a table arranged so it’s towards the back of a group of objects, instead of drawing items individually, we were encouraged to place our pencil on the paper and boldly draw the line that ran from the table, up along and around the top of the objects, trying not to keep our eyes focused on the subject rather than looking at the pencil, going slowly and really really looking. Rather than the drawing objects themselves, this meant you ended up drawing the space above the objects. Once I’d followed the line round to the other side, back to meet the flat table line I took my pencil off the paper and took it back to the beginning, this time letting the line travel down to draw the space below the objects. With a couple of adjustments (which you can see) to adjust to make it a bit more accurate. This gave you one big, solid shape in the middle – then a relatively easy task to draw the lines between individual objects. And TA DA! I was amazed how accurately the shapes turned out. It felt a little like turning your brain inside out to draw, but it worked!
Read MoreStill Life part 1: composition
Having looked at line and tone and light I was now moving on to think about how to bring all the things I’d learnt together into a still life studies. I was realising there was so much to think about. It wasn’t just a matter of thinking “right, there’s a group of objects – I’ll draw that” – how you controlled the light, the arrangement of objects, how you made the marks and what medium you used, what paper used and how you composed the drawing on it would all affect the picture. I’d have to ask myself questions. Did it have a good range of contrasts for interest? What is it about the picture that would make people want to look at it? Strong lines? An unusual subject? A theme of certain shapes or colours or subject or something else?
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