Tuesday 6 December 2011

PART 5: OBSERVATION IN NATURE: Exercise: Line Drawing

I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise, as I thought I might. I remember doing it at Bristol UWE when I did my foundation course but we had to draw the person opposite, with hilarious results. It certainly worked at loosening me up and helped me become familiar with my subject in a totally different way to what I am used to. You have to really trust your eyes and observational skill. Looking down even once feels like you're cheating! It gets easier the more you practice, as with all things.


One thing I noticed was that because of my subject - the skull - the drawings started to take on something that reminded me of illustrator Ralph Steadman, who's work I have always admired for being so grotesque and sinister, and often with a humourous or at least satirical quality. Below is his illustration for the Weekend Magazine, "I wouldn't be seen dead in a seal fur coat".


Something about the scruffy ink and macabre subject of my drawings made me think of Steadman and look back at some of his work. His drawings seem to me like a snapshot of some horrible thought or image in his head he might have had, one like any of us might have but we brush away and force it out of our minds - but he just turns those horrible thoughts into works or art. Brilliant I think.



After this exercise I began basically messing about a bit (or experimenting if you like) and moved out of my sketchbook and onto large paper, which in the most part I covered with a colour wash. I did a drawing in the style of Steadman, and then decided I'd try something I'd never tried before - mixing acrylic paint and PVA and literally squeezing or dripping onto the paper. It was good fun but also produced some interesting line drawings too, some of them retaining the grotesque label associated with the skull, and some ending up simply looking more abstract and almost jolly... It's pretty tricky to direct where your line goes, and can sometimes end quite disastrously but almost always ended up being at the very least a decent representation of a skull, and at the most, being an exciting, decorative and fun drawing.



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