Tuesday 7 December 2010

Enlarging an image

I think I was pretty successful in copying my drawing from the smaller squares to the larger ones. I really tried not to look at the picture as a whole, and just tried to focus on each square and what it contained. I was actually quite surprised at how it all came together so well once I'd completed all the squares.
The mug was fairly easy to enlarge, but the handle looks a little bit wonky.
The trickier parts were the more detailed squares like the ones containing the scissor handles for example - I think next time I try enlarging something that has more detailed parts, I would choose to use a grid of smaller squares, to enable more accuracy.

Thursday 2 December 2010

Using texture

I really enjoyed this texture project, but I feel like there's an awful lot more you could explore as long as you had access to more and more materials. I tried out lots of new things to get a textured look. I found the frottage technique a useful and interesting addition to my explorations. I ended up using mixed media for the drawing, to get the right effect for each of the items. I found that soaking a sponge in ink and lightly pressing it onto your paper gives quite a nice fluffy effect so I used that method to depict the woolen texture of the scarf I decided to draw, then used pen and ink to draw each stitch in it's woven pattern. I went for oil pastel for the driftwood because I wanted to show that it was quite a smooth piece of wood after years of being smoothed by the sea. Where the grain slices across the wood I scratched into the pastel with a sharp pair of scissors. The cardboard was the tricky part. I tried about 4 or 5 differing methods in my sketchbook to get the right look and none of them were perfect to be honest, but I settled with using pencil crayon to get a smooth flat surface colour. I then rubbed over some actual cardboard to get the corrugated lined effect, with a graphite pencil. I'm pleased with the end result.
I didn't do any tonal hatching at all, and yet managed to make the forms of my subjects look pretty reaslistic and interesting. Where the scarf's darkest parts were, I basically blotted more ink onto the paper, going over and over some areas. On the driftwood I blended in black, grey and brown oil pastel to show where there was shadow or hollows, and darker areas where the bark still remains. I used graphite and rubbed over the ready made lines of the corrugated cardboard to depict the darker areas of the piece of cardboard underneath the scarf. I also used graphite to just shade under the cardboard  but decided not to draw/paint in the wooden surface all my objects sat on. I didn't want to distract the eye away from the subject, and also felt that it looked finished as it was.
Frottage is definitely something I will use again. Not only is it useful for getting the right pattern or texture of an object, but it adds an attractive and unusual effect too. There's no real limit to what you can use with frottage, as long as it is textured, and that makes for an appealing technique to use when drawing.