Making marks was a useful exercise to begin the course. Although I'm familiar with most of my materials it is easy to forget all the possible techniques and uses for them. The old faithful pencil has always been my personal favourite because of it's versatility. You can treat it as though it's made of glass and hold it so lightly that you can barely see the marks with your naked eye. But you can also turn it practically on it's side for a thick, deep result (perfect for shading) or simply press as hard as it will allow before snapping if you want to create intense, sharp and dark lines. Graphite is quite special too. It runs over the page so smoothly and easily, and it's hard to imagine anything with a finer texture. Both pencil and graphite are excellent for materials for blending and cross hatching to achieve different shades. Charcoal again is a very versatile medium, and manages beautifully to pick up the surface texture of the paper beneath it. However I have found it is not as effective when wanting clear, defined, straight lines as say a pencil or pen might be. The ink and dip pen is another favourite of mine, perhaps because it looks quite elegant and dramatic on the page. It can be deep and dark at one point and then fine and delicate in another, which is perfect for using lines for shading. There is a lot movement in ink. Fineliner pens are fantastic to use for drawing. I love their kind of thin scratchiness on the paper. In the past I have found them useful for sketching buildings or anything with a lot of fine detail - very good for cross hatching and stippling. Fibre tip (or felt tip) pens have a lovely graceful flow about them and are great for creating bold, brassy blocks of colour but not good for tonal shading. Coloured pencils are pleasant to use, especially for shading as they blend quite nicely. Soft pastels are ideal for a well blended result as I found when using my finger, but they are useless for cross hatching and I imagine similarly bad with stippling. Oil pastels perform equally as well when blending them into one another, but pretty terrible for other techniques. Biro was a nice surprise. Of course it is usually associated with writing, however it produced very nice results when used for stippling and cross hatching. It also has a nice flow across the page. Water soluble pencils are a totally new medium for me. At first I wasn't at all sure how to use them until my partner gave me a mini crash course. However I don't think I've quite got the hang of them yet and will loook forward to trying again with them.
I've always found doodling a liberating experience, because usually you do it unconsciously and allow yourself to drift off, not really thinking about what you are doing. That's why to start with I found it a little tricky to get stuck in with doodling in my sketchbook, because I was conscious of what I was doing, but after a while it became relaxing and I found it difficult to stop. I found it enjoyable to let myself go, while trying to get the most out of all the mediums. I chose an underwater theme for my A2 sheet of paper. I had crabs, seaweed, fish scales, rocks and water in the back of my mind and tried hard not to make anything look too much like those things, but admittedly did find that quite difficult. I tried using some very thin red tissue paper for a different result, and found the ink spreading and blotting all over the place, which was not what I had intended, but I actually liked the effect very much.
The exercises have really opened my mind to what I can achieve when I sit down and pick up some other kind of medium, instead of that old faithful pencil.
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