Posts Tagged "art"
Writing Workshop – The girl and the jam jars
She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.
With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.
Read MoreGiant 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!
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