Day One

Today was my first day studying Art, Design and Media Foundation Studies at Reading College and I already feel more engrossed in the world of art then I have ever been before. I feel this course will perfectly prepare me for HE and the prospect of attending lectures and seminars excites me. At my sixth form we never did any form of contextual studies besides research to work 'in the style of an artist' of our own choice and therefore never explored the vast world of art history, so the mini lecture on the history of drawing we had this afternoon after induction was very interesting for me.

Looking back now I wish I had taken notes as I've forgotten the names of some interesting pieces we looked at. However, the idea that drawing used to be a way of explaining stories to people who were illiterate reiterated for me how important art is as a subject and makes me care less about the people at sixth form who would question why you would study art in HE. This made me more excited to be surrounded by a group of people who feel the same way about the subject as I do.

'Adam and Eve' Albrecht Dürer 1507 

We looked at drawings from all across time and how similar it is now to those in Lascaux Cave from 17000 years ago. It was strange to consider that these drawings were completed before the concept of 'art' even existed.

'Great Black Bull' 

We considered various approaches and styles of drawing from Michelangelo to Matisse.

Drawing Task

For the starting point of this task we had to follow a simple set of instructions that told us to 'draw a line', 'draw another line', 'draw two parallel lines', 'draw a line that cuts through these four lines' and so forth. At first we ended up with some very simple drawings consisting of thin straight lines with no exploration into mark making at all. We were then asked to complete the task again but this time thinking about what else could be considered a line and to use different materials to explore how they created different types of lines. Below our the two outcomes (mine are the two one the right).