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!?"
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