Self Directed Drawings

 

In the portrait above, I wanted to work with tone and see how I can show the details on the face by creating shadow using ink and water. I think if I did this with charcoal then I would create a larger range of tone on the face.

 

I did this portrait using sketching pencils and black fine liner. I felt that just the sketching pencils didn't make some of the drawing dark enough and therefore used the fine liner. I think this is a very strong portrait and I have capture the girls face well.

 This was just a quick sketch for a larger painting I intend to do.

I enjoy sketching sculptures...they're the next best thing to a real life model. I feel I could have gone into this drawing more and created a larger range of tone, but I am pleased with the outcome. I should try and get the rest of the legs and feet in the drawing next time.

 I wanted to play with colour and create a drawing after the colour has been applied to the paper. This needs more practice as the water colour bled a bit but I like the idea of this.

 I was watching some dancers and realised how their bodies can go into some tricky positions and I wanted to experiment with some of these poses. I would like to draw more from life with these sort of things, however I will have to work fast as I think I would struggle to get many drawings from fast moving dancers.

These are a few sketches I did when I was on holiday and sitting around the pool. It wasn't the easiest time to draw as it was very hot and people were constantly moving around me but I tried to get some fast sketches done.

 I also did this water colour when on holiday in Italy. It would have been good to get it finished but it had started to rain. The scenery where I was staying was beautiful and it would have been great to get some more paintings/drawings done but there wasn't enough time.

2 and 3 point perspective

I find buildings difficult to draw as there are so many straight lines and angles. I need a lot more practice drawing from life and looking at different points of perspective to get a better idea on proportion, angles and composition of buildings. Drawing buildings is also quite time consuming and takes patience to draw a whole building, I definitely need to practice this.

Clay Heads

Today we were given a picture of Nigel Farage and a lump of clay on a stick and had to sculpt Farage's face. We were looking at satirical/caricature drawings styles, so this activity was to help us mould the face in a more dramatic way than how Farage actually looks.

I used both the original image of Nigel Farage and the clay head to make this caricature. I think I could have dramatized more of his features to make him look more like a caricature.

Letters

I really liked working with letters today. We had large letters to draw from and positioned them in different angles to get the different perspectives of the letters. Shading the letters also helped with the perspective, depicting the different tones on each of the sides of the letters. It would be good to carry on this activity with other letters and making words with letters in the same angle.

Cars

Drawing cars was very difficult, a lot more difficult than I was expecting!
The angles on cars are very tricky to draw. When I got back to the studio, I was advised to draw a 3D box in the perspective that I want the car to be in, and then to draw the car within the box. This made it a bit easier, but I have still struggled to make it look like an actual car. More practice is needed with this, drawing more cars on location would help.

Boxes

Today we used boxes to find different perspectives for if we were to draw buildings. We started with just free hand single line drawings. We then used charcoal and ink for depicting the tones on each side of the box. We also stuck circles and rectangles onto the boxes so that we could see how the shape of those change when they are stuck on different angles. I would have liked to work more with shadow in this activity as I think that I would have benefited with the angles of shadows as well.

Monocular drawings

This is my favourite sketch I did from the monocular drawings. I like how the distance is shown through the people in the drawing and I think this is a strong composition.

Doing monocular drawings, I tried drawing some things very zoomed in, focussing on just one object, and then I tried focussing on an area further away, and also getting a whole span of the room into a drawing. It's useful to experience with these different kinds of monocular zoom as it gives me a better idea of perspective.

Mummy - Scaring and Fear

 

 

I really enjoyed todays life drawing, the poses were different to the sort of poses we usually draw which made them interesting. They're useful poses to have to reference from as they're unusual. I think I could have used some different types of media to do some of these sketches, like conte or charcoal and create more tone in the drawings, but because the poses change so fast, it's difficult to do quick drawings using those media's.

 

 

We had a really good setting to do the second half of our drawing today. We went into the university chapel so the pew's were used to hide behind and were a part of most of the drawings. I find that using fine liner for quick drawings, when sketching on location, are the best type of media to use. This is because they're fast to use and permanent so I don't have to worry about smudging, which happens with pencils or very wet ink. The downside of using fine liner, is some of lines are wispy which makes the drawings quite messy, but it doesn't effect the drawings too much.

Life Drawing focussing on balance poses

I found todays drawings quite difficult to do as some of the poses were very unusual and the body was contorted in strange shapes. This made it hard to capture a realistic impression of how the body looked.

Today was very cold and we took the life drawing session outside. Sadly my hands were far too cold to  draw so the later drawings are very disappointing. I must take gloves next time!!