Drawing Week

Drawing Week

After the Exploratory 1 stage we spent a week drawing various installations. We had to complete various drawing tasks for each rotation so at the end we would have a large body of dynamic work. 

I began at the nature installation which was a large pile of flowers, leaves etc. I found this rotation the most challenging of the 4 and I wasn't happy with my outcomes. It was the first rotation and I thought we had to use our viewfinder and draw the entire composition including what was behind it etc and only use pencil or pen. I ended up with some rather plain pieces of work which I was not happy with compared to the pieces created nearer the end of the week by others who had taken one flower/leaf out of the pile and drawn that using a variety of colour and mix media. I would have loved to go back to this installation and completed all of the tasks again but there wasn't time. 

 

The next installation I drew from was the pears on the crumpled up pieces of paper. I found this rotation a lot more enjoyable and I really tried to explore colour and mixed media in it. My favourite piece from this installation was my drawing from memory (second image) as I felt I explored the colour of the pear, light and dark, mark making and mixed media. This piece of work was quite light, although it explored the shape and curvature of the pear it did not consider the weight of the pear and how it would feel if you held it. I therefore tried to explore this in 60 minute drawing (second from last image, on parcel paper). 

 

The next installation I explored was the architectural set up in the photography space. At first I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy working from this installation as it's quite angular, exploring straight lines and positive and negative space. My first few drawings weren't that exciting and I wasn't having fun with it so I turned my technique on it's head and tried to explore the space more abstractly. I wanted to accurately represent the structure of the space in terms of where the wood met and what was in the foreground/background but I wanted my technique to be more loose, using more vivid colours. I ended up really enjoying working in this space, although it was quite dark and hard to see what I was doing, but I thought it was an exciting installation to explore mix media and mark making on and I created some of my favourite pieces from the whole week.  

 

The final installation, and probably my favourite, were the skeletons. I have a strong interest in the human form and I could really explore that here. My favourite drawings from this rotation were the smaller ones from my sheet of nine thumbnail sketches. I loved my ink sketch of the skeleton torso as well as the first skull sketch and the white acrylic skeleton and the black background. I enjoyed exploring colour when there was none, for instance the rib cages where I've added red. I also created my favourite continuous line drawing of the week in this section, the large charcoal skeleton upper body.