Drawing

Week 1 - Observing & Sketchbooks

[ See the full brief. ]

Lecture notes

Artist Research

While observational drawing may be a straightforward task, there are a lot of drawing fundamentals that underpin each piece. Each subject matter, whether it be still-life, environments, or life drawing, has been represented accurately and the life of everything has been captured too. It feels real. The full scene can be visualised quite easily even when there aren't many lines on the page, especially with Rogers' work. The most important thing to be learnt here is the ways of portraying the essence of an object.

Martin Salisbury

Lucinda Rogers

Paul Heaston

Tutorials

My Work

The first place to start for observational drawing has got to be one's immediate environment. It's a good thing I decorated my new studio space as soon as possible, because it gave me a lot to observe. Here, I tried to capture a variety of materials, with the most challenging being my clear pencil case (that's been through many phases of repair). Also, I noticed I plain forgot to add in shadows cast by the objects, so I paid more attention to that on the second page (right image). One interesting detail was that the seashell had a slight reflection.

Free stuff alert! Derwent has kindly provided my course with some brand spanking new materials to try out, most notably of all, an A4 sketchbook.

I soon regretted tackling this hand-knitted scarf, because it was extremely difficult due to all the details in the wool. As a result, this took a considerable amount of time. Some of the threads were multicoloured, which was overwhelming to my observing eye, but I got into the groove eventually. The blank areas represent the lightest colour of the scarf. As for the table scene, I became a lot more invested in recording all the details and shapes of the objects on it as the drawing progressed.

Week 2 - Location, Location, Location

Lecture notes

This was a short lecture as most of the allotted session time was dedicated to drawing outside near the campus. It started raining, sadly, and I only managed a few in the time I had.

The uncertain time constraint did put some pressure on my 'slow down, take time to consider the subject' approach. I eventually made peace with the fact that the cars always drove away if I chose to draw them. The pencil drawings felt more like studies than drawings. I definitely gained something from this experience since I never personally choose to draw cars, and it shows.

After the fineliner Fiesta, I got some tutor feedback and started off a lot more simpler - with boxes and parallel lines to capture the shape of the car first, before trying anything harder, like the wheels. I also took more care to not draw what I couldn't actually see (i.e. the car roof). The car in the 3rd study was from the perspective of 2 floors above.

This is the view outside my window, which took a lot longer than I thought it would. The sparse amount of process photos was due to my intense focus, I apologise.

Week 3 - Clothed Life Drawing

Q&A session with Jonathan Edwards

A good portion of Jonathan Edwards' advice corroborated with other professional illustrators' views. However, I did also gain some new insight, for example, he mentioned how sometimes work done during personal time could generate more work than the professional work.

For the majority of these drawings, I worked in tiny A6 sketchbooks. As this is no longer still-life, I captured the form of the subject as quick and with as few lines as possible, before including essential details that would make these people distinct from each other. Since there were parts of the body which were obscured, I decided to also draw the object covering them. In the studio, it was mainly chairs that fulfilled this role.

I imagined centre lines whilst drawing, as was advised by a tutor, and this helped with getting down the positioning of certain details and with the structure of the figure against furniture. I redrew the double page spread since I realised after that the angle of the entire scene was wrong and tried to amend this by changing the scale of the objects closer to me. As Lucinda Rogers stops drawing a person when they leave, I too employed this same strategy. It has left one of my figures completely untethered to the rest of the scene, unfortunately, as this is a common result of both a person and their chair moving.

This last set was drawn during a trip to LICAF (the Lakes' International Comic Art Festival).

I remembered why I don't draw during long commutes as well and the bumpy (though expressive) linework is a testament to this.

One thing I enjoyed from this experience is the range of different people I got to draw.

The best time for life drawing was in the Dave Gibbons interview, which was also plenty insightful.

The drawing on the right was done during a different journey, on the train instead (which is a lot less bumpy than on the back of a coach).

Week 5-8: Life Drawing

Session 1

In collaboration with Jil

Session 2

Session 3

I was very pleased with how all of these turned out.

Session 4

This was also a great session - it seems wet media is very engaging for life drawings. Here I learnt how red brings objects to the foremost point of the composition, which is helpful for guiding the eye.

Weeks 9-12: Portfolio Collection

My chosen format is a scrapbook because this would be most compatible with the way I've tried out various processes for my drawings so far. Rejected formats are a calendar and a jigsaw puzzle.

Research

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I think this format would suit my theme of drawings that represent different times of the year, like specific months or seasons. The top three images below are of a digitally produced notebook from the Pixar film Turning Red. These were included as the inclusion of certain details is what makes it believable as a physical notebook.

The process shots I remembered to take:

Pieces in their entirety:

Final stage preparation

As scrapbooks are very personalised, it made sense for me to create a font out of my handwriting for the digital mock-up.

Calling upon previously learnt Photoshop tips and tricks, I produced the digital mock-up of my scrapbook portfolio (or scrapfolio, if you'd like). It was mostly Blending Options > Bevel and Emboss.

Bank of assets for scrapbook editing magic