Assignment Three Feedback Sections

To begin with, in this section I've discovered something very important - dip pens! Pretty expensive to keep up, but I've got a good set now, and I focused on them most for this part of the course.

Exploring coloured media

This little exercise was a bit like going back to the start of the course! Very refreshing to doodle away. The oil pastel and ink dip pens I think I liked best of these bits. What a turn around! The coloured pencil (I may be biased) seems a bit 'samey' now. It's either very flat or, if you're trying to create tone with it, distracting. Let me explain that one - you're not seeing the colour, you're seeing the marks made by the pencil. I hope that makes sense! I tried some plain pastel next, and it's fine - nice and smudged. I tried to do a curved highlight in one of my pastel boxes, and it didn't come out all that well. I would have made it lighter in the middle with my eraser, but that felt like cheating here, when it should really be the pure medium. The oil pastel was a bit dull at first, until I tried the same highlight as the other pastel - it came out really well here! It's quite hard to explain why, but it faded at just the right moment to give an impression of a curve. I'll have to try it out again later, and hope this wasn't just a fluke! I did some felt tips after that, and tried combining them at a couple of points. The trouble with them is that if you choose colours that are slightly too different, it can look disastrous! As for the last boxes, I used some dip pens and the ink I had (Sorry, there were only two colours that hadn't separated into water and solid blocks of coloured...pigment? Would you say that for ink?) from an old calligraphy set. They came out very well. I thought they were striking as there was no possibility of the marks being random in a false way - it blobs by itself, so you can't subconsciously organise it (that's ok here, but I'll see how it pans out - I might not be so happy about it dripping in a detailed drawing!). At the same time, while gel pens are preferable to dip pens, being more predictable, I'm intrigued by the variety of vivid colours. While my gel pens are still looking good in the blue and red experiment, I think that the ink could also lend itself to detail well. I think I get a kind of thrill from using the dip pens because it feels so... historic? Very cheesy, I know, but it does make you feel a bit like some kind of scholar or poet. Oh, and the cross-hatching with different colours looks great!

Detailed observation of nature

The feedback questions for this section are a bit awkward to do online, so I'll give an overview. I thought that my pencil drawing (that you can look up, it's the one with the avocado) worked very well, and the texture on the avocado itself was particularly good. It was more... knobbly(?) On one side and smoother on the other, so to bring that out, I used little groups of ovals for the rougher side and wobbly lines that curled up where it was smoother. This is more difficult to describe than I thought! After I'd done them, I shaded under them and across the parts that were in shadow. Then I had to go over the line work with a darker pencil and build up the layers. Normally my drawings are too light, so I hope you'll forgive the slightly underwhelming contrast. I think it looks fairly real though, and I'm happy with it. The line and ink drawings I did in this section weren't as good, but I'm not as practiced with them, so I suppose I have a bit of an excuse. In one of the ink drawings I did - 'Dip pen experiment', some dripped from the pen onto the paper where it shouldn't be - I know I shouldn't be, but after getting on ok with the pens in the first two drawings (of twigs) I did, I wasn't really expecting it, and got quite upset about it blobbing. I tried to paint over it... Didn't really work. Ink is good for spindly twigs and little withered leaves, but not for shadows I find! I think I can work out a way around this though - maybe do drawings in ink, but do their shadows in felt tip or with a brush in grey ink? They do look a bit silly when the subject is a similar colour to the shadow. My pink and blue leaves (that I did when I only had a couple of different colour inks) were a little plain - I should do them again but adding more detail (and/or texture) next time. I thought the best part of that drawing was the twig with the pine needles on I'd accidentally brought back from the woods (it was attached to something else and went in the bag with it), to be honest! The shadow for the needles wasn't the best in the drawing, but I thought it was the most eye-catching piece. I thought my composition for these bits was mostly alright, save the ink line drawing of the lettuce leaf earlier (just 'Ink lettuce'), which I started in the middle and went left, thinking it'd end up bigger than it did. I don't know if doing line drawings helped me see the space bigger for a couple of reasons. One - that the actual composition of the line drawings wasn't too brilliant; two - that I did them on A4, which may be easier to visualise filling up to the edges (in my mind anyway) and three - that I have a bit of a problem drawing objects anything but 'sight-size' if you know what I mean. I don't know if I can 'zoom in' on a couple of different things or a very complicated or awkwardly shaped solo object and have all the different areas in proportion at the end. I need to work on this. Oh, and to wrap up this section, I'll just mention that I've always been a real devotee to detail, unless, as I've discovered, I get halfway through an ink drawing and think "what I've done so far is good... I don't want to drip ink on it!" and get stuck. Not a good place to be! I would never have thought that (aside from perseverance) I would need such willpower!

Still life

Note to self. Must think more about backgrounds. That's what I didn't think worked. That, and I need to work more on the texture of wood. I've got to crack it to make more interesting set-ups. I think I'm getting to like linear drawing more now - although I'm tempted to go over everything with pencil to give it a shadow, when the picture's finished, it's normally...passable. Now, I normally discuss what I think worked and what didn't under each picture I post, but I'll talk a little bit about it here. The coloured pencil drawing 'Coloured pencil still life with peppers' (me being a stickler for detail again) I felt worked better than the pastel one 'Pastel still life setup with peppers'. As always, I'm trying to improve my pencil drawings by making them darker. I thought I did well in this drawing - but doing a pastel drawing on the same scale (too small) as a working pencil one was never going to yield the appropriate amount of descriptive detail. The more linear one 'Ink still life setup' was... ok. I resented not being able to use more defined outlines with the pastel and pencil drawings and not properly including shadows in the ink picture. But that's me, trying to be a perfectionist. I thought the pen picture had a kind of naive charm to it, especially with the little trail of snail shells, so I got over it not looking true to life depth-wise. I should also say I liked the twig covered in pine needles in that drawing the best - it's a good detail that lends the whole picture more credit. I suppose it didn't require as much detail as the log in the background (which I failed at, I feel), so it was easy to make it look more realistic. I may be rambling here! I felt that some aspects of the more tonal drawings (especially the grapes in the pastel drawing) needed more definition to make them stand out, basically, but that's not the idea! After I'd finished them, I realised that a sketchy contrasting background would've been nice... Well, I'll remember for next time. I was trying to do the shadows right, so I put them (the real life objects) down on some plain paper and it didn't occur to me until they were done that they were... floating. I do come off as forgetful here... I suppose something I can give myself credit for is that I wasn't tempted to put everything out in a line or on a grid pattern, and overlapped my objects for more depth. That's something!

Drawing fruit and vegetables in colour

(I did quite a few of the bits for this in my sketchbook, but the couple of examples I do have on this blog are pleasing.) Having done... well... next to no drawings with oil pastel before, I think I got on ok here - although the example in the folder of another student's drawing is really lovely, and, I think, much better than mine. As you can see though, I had a couple of tries, and I'm getting better. Practice practice! Anyway, in my dip pen drawing, 'Ink still life setup (with pineapple!)', I suppose I do have quite a bit of negative space. After I'd filled in the fruit, it looked so nice that I didn't want to risk a scribbly background that might blob. I know that I could do some deliberate blobs to add interest, but I'm just learning about it, and that idea scares me! In my oil pastel drawings, I have very little negative space (excepting the 'Bowl of oil pastel fruit', which I was going to put a plant behind, but didn't in the end, because I loved the colours all together and didn't want to add green!) I filled in the background of my first attempt 'Oil pastel fruit and veg.' part-way with some black for the edge of the desk. This drawing has four different sections of negative space to my eye. Layer one, fruit; two, plate; three, desk; four, pale yellow background. It depends what you count! Another thing about this section is that I didn't realise how colours completely opposite or far too bright or dark work well layered over others. In my bowl of fruit, for example, the shadows on the oranges I used purple for! That's not right! Surely a dark red / grey combination would be better! And yet, it looks great! Getting in some practice with these new materials has been good, and learning to draw the detail in anything will improve your next attempt! You ask what I found most challenging... I suppose the worst bit of these drawings was the plate in the first oil pastel one here. I suppose I should have had a trial run with them and got used to where the colour would appear... Um, let me expand on that! With oil pastels, as they don't run straight into a point like a convenient pencil, when you draw with them, the line that you (or maybe just 'I') want to appear in a certain place will be higher or lower than you were expecting. Pathetic, I know! But unlike pencil, it can't be erased, and unlike chalk pastel, it can't be smudged back into place. Takes a little getting used to.

Drawing plants and flowers

Doing the negative space exercises for this bit, I had to leave out almost all detail, something that I'm fiercely against doing! However, I did a couple of them, and I think my composition (dare I say composition, what I really mean is 'fitting all the leaves on this side of the plant on this piece of paper and hopefully leaving enough room to fit in the rest'!), were I to work out the negative space for a drawing with this method before launching into the real picture, would be improved. I mean, like I say, if I have to fit a tricky subject onto paper that looks a little too small for 'sight size' then at least if I can't get the hang of fitting it into the space properly, I can get a sense of what would look good cropped creatively. They do look quite unique - a white abstract shape in a sea of charcoal (The pot plant with one leaf I did looks a little sorry, but it does in real life too) and I'm sure that a series of objects overlapped would look interesting - I'm thinking the legs of thin chairs and tables and the like - if I got in some interesting angles, it could look like a web... How did I judge proportions... well, I don't recall doing a lot of explaining for this before. I hope I'm not going to sound mad, but ever since I was small, I've imagined things as LEGO bricks. By that I mean I can remember how big things are by thinking about how wide an object is, then thinking about how long it is, and imagining if you scaled it down, what dimensions the LEGO brick is. Some people think in inches, some in centimetres... What else can I say about it? That's how I've always imagined things! Anyway, the ways I think these worked in a three dimensional way are that I tried my best when I had the subject lit from the side to include the light from different stems falling onto the other parts of the plant and how they bend around the form. I think that, and how they related to the vase itself, gave the pictures a more 3D feel. In the pencil one - 'pencil vase with tulips' I tried to put more into the background to show space. The stripes on the flat (black and white) material I tried to make progressively thinner while keeping in the pattern and the slight rise and fall of the cloth.

Drawing animals

For me, the main challenge of drawing animals was not that there was a particular aspect I couldn't draw, it was that I'm so allergic to anything with fur, we can't keep pets. I have one friend with pets - he has a cat and a lizard - now, when I went over to his house to draw them, I thought maybe I'd be easy on myself (drawing-wise, not allergy-wise!) and try the cat. But it kept leaving the house or going and hiding under furniture... What could I do? So I tried the lizard. Unfortunately, it was in a dark tank in a dark part of the house and you could only see it when the heat lamp was on! I gave it a go, but I definitely need more practice. Another thing is that I'm vegan, so buying in a fish was really out of the question. I'm sorry, but I think I'll have to do something else to make up for this. I thought that for the lizard, sketchy pastel and charcoal showed off it's markings well, while pen worked fine for scales, but not sketching the subject out. One odd thing was that although she didn't move much, she'd turn her head to look at things quite often, and I ended up drawing her head too large in a few sketches. I sort of despaired of this for a while, and tried to draw birds out of the kitchen window, which went... Alright. I tried drawing horses in a field, but that didn't really work either, as they were either too far away or moving about so much I couldn't get them down properly... We might have to go to a wildlife park or zoo I suppose, but I'm not so keen on that ethically. I might be able to visit a friend we have with chickens... I'll work on it!

So, to summarise. I've learnt about two new materials this time (I'm finally branching out!), dip pens and oil pastels. One's good for detail while staying bold, one's good for sketchy but bright colours in interesting combinations. I'm pretty happy with all my plants, but when good opportunities arise, I'll have to go and find more animals. My tutor Edward sent me some nice feedback and a couple of pictures to look at, one of which (the rose) I think he did himself - I'll post them down here. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to claim any of these are my own work! (Oh, and I think he got my name a little bit wrong on a few pages, but you can see it's meant for me as he refers to drawings I have up here on the blog)