ASSIGNMENT 2

I really felt like this assignment was a good opportunity to show that I'd moved forward considerably since the last one. My understanding of the changing nature of reflected colour has definitely improved and I think my ability to recognise a more balanced composition has too - though I do still find it tricky to explain in words exactly why I think it's a good composition, perhaps the correct lingo will come in time with more practice, observation and reading art texts?

I chose oil pastel, firstly because the last oil pastel drawing I attempted was a disaster so I set myself a bit of a challenge - I wanted to prove to myself that I do have a handle on the medium, however minimal it may be. Secondly because it's a pleasant, bold medium to work with and if you get it right it can look really good. However, there were a few things I wanted to add to the medium - I wanted sharper lines than it can offer, so I used a pencil here and there in areas where I thought would benefit from being more defined. (I do think that using watersoluble pencils would have been a really good medium to use for this still life too, so if I hadn't opted for oils I would have used them instead.)

I chose some vegetables (aubergine, mushrooms, pepper), some driftwood, a tin potted plant and a white ceramic jug. I began by doing some basic sketches in my sketchbook, messing about with the composition, adding things, and taking some away. I wasn't sure intitially how prominent I wanted the jug to be. I wanted it to balance with the tin pot somehow. I then did a large initial idea, then I changed the composition one last time and using a viewfinder did another line drawing in brown pen. I followed this up with a tonal sketch in ballpoint pen - I knew this stage was going to be crucial for getting the tones right in the final drawing so although it was quite a quick sketch I looked really carefully at the range of tones from the bright white of the wall behind to the almost black beneath the aubergine.

I felt ready for the final drawing, but due to losing light that day had to leave it for the following day. By this time my seated position had moved slightly to the left, which changed the composition quite dramatically. At the time I wasn't worried about this but in hindsight, I wished I'd used a grid and been a little more observant because I actually prefer the composition I had in the tonal drawing. I missed off a large part of the jug and the third mushroom, which I think was a mistake when looking at the finished drawing.

The drawing took me a long time - the aubergine and the plant in particular. The reflective skin of the aubergine was fascinating in that it changed quite a lot when a cloud moved over the sun or away from it. But because of this it was really tricky to get it right in the moment, and in the end I just had to focus on each plane of colour/tone separately to the next. I am pleased with the way the leaves of the plant turned out, though without seeing the still life group yourself it might be hard to believe that the plant actually looked anything like that! It was a very bright day for the most part and the natural light was streaming in from almost directly above so the leaves had flashes of almost white flicking across those planes that faced directly into the light. Overall though, I was disappointed with the end result. Mainly because I foolishly wavered from my preliminary sketches which renders them pretty much obsolete, so that was a really silly thing to do. And also because however pleased I may be with one area like the leaves of the plant, it doesn't make up for the fact that the pepper is not very good and there isn't enough strong cast shadow to make the still life more alive. I think I preferred my tonal study to the final piece! It has more depth and although colourless, more vibrancy too. But, I set myself a challenge deliberately by using oil pastels, I was well aware that it may not turn out to my liking, so I'm not going to beat myself up about it. There will always be areas I'll need to work on with more vigour. I just need to focus and be more aware of my mistakes as I go along, not only afterwards.

Project: Drawing animals

Exercise: Grabbing the chance

This was definitely a challenging exercise! Although my cat is very lazy, he moves about quite a lot even when he's totally relaxed. He's quite a jumpy cat too - the slightest noise and he leaps out of his skin. So the hardest part of this exercise was getting a decent sketch in before he decided to lick a different area! He's a lovely cat to draw though, despite his sketchiness (excuse the pun) - he has a really happy face, and things like dirty paws and a mangled ear (from fighting) just act as interesting added characteristics. I feel like pencil, although a bit boring perhaps, was a really effective medium for drawing my cat. In the larger drawing, I used quite a hard pencil for the finer details like the white hairs and whiskers, and then also quite a soft, dark pencil for the black hairs. Chopping and changing between the pencils enabled me to depict the details in a more appropriate way.

Exercise: Fish on a plate

The most difficult aspect of this drawing exercise was the changing light coupled with the very reflective surface of the fish. In retrospect, I should have used a lamp, but I didn't anticipate quite how long the drawing would take - unfortunately the light had changed quite a bit by the time I'd neared the end. I don't think it had too much of a detrimental effect, but the cast shadows will be slightly out at the very least. I chose to use pencil crayons (I didn't have my water soluble ones unfortunately, they were in a box on its way back to the UK from New Zealand), which may not have been the best medium but they did enable me to recreate the finer details of the scales and suchlike quite easily. The fish is a yellow tailed snapper, which I'd never come across before - I thought the colours were really unusual and tropical-esque. The fish was obviously very shiny, so the light from the window reflecting off it's surface produced areas of white all over the fish. It's belly was white in colour and the main colour was certainly pink, but the scales on its back were a really strange purple/grey/brown colour that was really quite difficult to emulate. Definitely another challenging exercise.

I've been thinking of other places around Bristol where there are animals I could draw easily enough. We have a couple of city farms, one very close by where they have pigs, goats, ducks, etc. Obviously there's the zoo as well, where on a quiet weekday morning you could avoid the crowds of children. The park nearby often has swans on the pond, and always ducks of other kinds, it's also a good dog walking park. So there are several places I can think of off the top of my head to get some practice in - it would be great to try out drawing some animals that move about a lot.

Research point: George Stubbs

George Stubbs is a household name, I would go so far as to say. His anatomical studies are recognisable across the globe. Why? Because they are extraordinary. He was obsessed with anatomy as a child and used this innate fascination to produce very accurate depictions of the living, or indeed dead beings around him. Seeing these images helps us to get to grips with what we're made of and why we move the way we do.

Stubbs' incredible ability to capture exact proportions, texture, tone, etc enabled him to produce paintings so admirable that he had soon secured a healthy income through commissions from various Dukes and other aristocrats. The fact that he took time to study his subjects literally inside and out meant his understanding of their make up and therefore their true to life appearance was unmatched by fellow artists. He understood the way a body moves when running for example, because he knew where and how the muscles would appear under the skin having studied the dead beast in a still life session.

Of course Stubbs would have drawn on site in front of the live animals too in order to recreate the scenes he wanted for his painting, but it would have been these initial anatomical drawings that gave him the upper hand.

Research point: Drawing animals - da Vinci and Durer

This drawing of a horse by Leonardo da Vinci shows he had a really good understanding of the way a horse moves and what his muscles are doing beneath it's thick skin. He obviously spent a lot of time studying the animals whilst they raced. You can almost feel the wind rushing past as you look at this image. You can see where da Vinci has repeated some of the horses body parts, obviously trying to keep up with the fast moving animal. He has shaded in areas using line to indicate darker tones or shadow, and also the fine textue of the horses hair. The faint image of the it's rider is a sign of a future painting perhaps.

Here is another amazing sketch, this time of a lion. You do wonder where da Vinci found the time to hang out and study lions... Again, here he uses line marks with his pen and ink to indicate the texture of the animals hair. The drawing goes unfinished - he has focused more on the lions huge roaring mouth and his mane flicking about him as he moves than the rest of his body. Catching snippets of an animal's pose is clearly enough to capture it's nature.

This is a beautiful study of a hare by Durer. He has managed to recreate this furry animal's texture so well - you can see that it's soft to touch. A typical pose for a hare in a relaxed state - hind legs tucked underneath, ears upright in anticipation - but actually quite a rare pose too as you usually see hares pounding the turf, disappearing into the distance.

I love this study too. It displays the bat in a way that makes it look so vulnerable and open to the viewer. Durer's animal drawings definitely have more of a scientific look about them than da Vinci's sketches. Durer drew dead things in all their gorey, explicit detail, plain for all to see. Da Vinci's drawings have more of a romantic look about them... unfinished and well, sketchy! But perhaps it's the grainy, tarnished paper and old browned ink making me think that...

Project: Drawing plants and flowers

Exercise: Negative space in a plant

I chose a relatively simple plant, it's quite a young one and has quite a small amount of leaves. This was good in a way as it made the drawing of negative space a little easier on me, however, it was actually not easy by any stretch. I had to rub out lines continously throughout and at one point I even rubbed out the majority of what I'd done and started over as it began to become quite warped. I had to work really hard not to move the position I was sat in because if I moved my head even slightly to one side the outline of the negative space would change quite dramatically. I actually really enjoyed the exercise, challenging as it was. The focus you need to get the negative space precise takes a lot of effort. It looked really quite abstract when I thought I'd finished so I drew in quite a few extra lines here and there to make it look more plant-like and three-dimensional. I found it really helpful in doing the following exercise of the flowers in a vase in coloured pencil.

Exercise: Plants and flowers in coloured pencil

I felt like I wanted to create something quite different here to what I'd usually produce and used the opportunity of flowers in a vase to draw quite a feminine and light drawing. I started by doing a few preliminary sketches to try and get a good composition, filling the page as much as I could while still including the other objects I wanted to draw with the flowers. As I said the negative space exercise proved very useful for this drawing. I used the squinty-eyes technique to draw in a faint outline in a light colour to begin with, then built and built colour over the top, getting the flowers in first, then moving my way down the page as I worked. I feel OK with the result but now feel like there should have definitely been something in the background behind the vase (some fabric perhaps?) as there is a lot of white space - which does keep the drawing nice and light in actual fact but it could benefit from a little more colour. To have another horizontal line or two would have perhaps brought the composition together a little better...? I was particularly happy with the nail polish bottle for some reason. I always find it a challenge to draw glass - I find it a little bit daunting! But what I did in this drawing was really just focus on the colour of the reflected light, allowing myself to forget that I was drawing glass. I have to admit that I am still learning to let loose while I draw - I focus so hard on the objects themselves, as I know them in their familiarity, that I lose their actual reality somehow. Does that make sense!?

Exercise: Drawing with other coloured media

            

OK, the first problem with this project was that inbetween this and the previous exercise of drawing the flowers in coloured pencil I'd had a very busy long bank holiday weekend... so as you can imagine the flowers had taken a bit of a turn for the worse! Still, I persevered and did one A3 drawing using ballpoint pens and pencil, and another using oil pastel, coloured pencil and pen and ink. I didn't like the first combination particularly but think they could work well together if the subject were different - or maybe I was just trying too hard to create a replica of the first drawing but with new media? A mistake of course - I should have allowed the mediums to do the talking, as it were. The second drawing though was a better combination of mediums I think, but the drawing as a whole just didn't work. The oil pastel was perhaps too bold for the limp, decomposing bunch of flowers. I struggled to make them look as sad as they now looked. Anyway, it looked crap for want of a better expression, so I took it upon myself to crop the drawing massively which turned it into a completely different drawing altogether. The bold oil pastel didn't look out of place anymore against that expanse of white background. I did the drawing a huge favour, although still am not particularly happy with it. Overall, I think my expectations of the mediums used in this exercise did not transfer well with the still life group I'd chosen to draw. For some reason, it did not work for me. And I really wish it had! Especially as I've been really enjoying mixed media work - and I look at the lovely student drawing in ink below the brief and think "why could I not have done something more like that!?"