'Record' Project: Drawing Workshop and Development.

To generate ideas and begin work for out final major project, we had to bring in items to work from that were related to our theme. I chose glasses and toy cars. My project is called 'Record', I thought the glasses represented observation and the toy cars could relate to the everyday things you see around you. We were using them for a drawing workshop. This workshop was really fast paced, and covered a whole range of different experimental drawing techniques. I worked on sizes A4 to A2, and also on grounds we built ourselves.

I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, I think in some areas it really works, like the glasses cut out and where the oil has covered that. It gives it an interesting texture and almost looks like a print. I think I should have placed the large car cut out elsewhere, as the rectangle shape is cutting off the rest of the image. 

This one is tiny, only on A4. It worked initially but I regret cutting out a large section of the image. After that I struggled to find any use for the piece, or make it work with any other images.

This was the largest piece of work I did, A2. You can see that halfway through I managed to spill a whole pot of ink all over the paper. I did my best to half cover the spill with tracing paper and masking tape. It worked and I actually think it creates layers and texture. As a whole though, it definitely doesn't work. There is too much happening.

You can see that this was originally one piece, which I then cut up and developed, adding collage and layering up tissue and tracing paper, also adding a black ink drawing (bottom left). I think these were my favourite outcomes from the day. Cutting the image in half created two separate pieces that were decent. 

At home I wanted to develop another piece of work, using a viewfinder I tried to pick out areas from different pieces of work that I thought could stand on their own. 

The second image is my favourite, really toned down. In the end I actually made a completely different decision, and cut up the A2 piece of work (3rd image on the post). I really wasn't happy with it. I got rid of the car cut out, and places the glasses cut out over the ink spill, and then added some red found materials because it needed some colour. It's still really messy, but I'm glad I took the risk and cut it up because I'm much happier with the outcome now.

Overall, the workshop was perfectly timed for me. I think I was slipping back into being too careful and not taking any risks. Working this way reminded me that I need to start from scratch and really work on generating ideas rather than focusing on outcomes from the beginning. My work was clumsy and messy but it doesn't matter, because developing my work allowed me to really focus on moving forward and improving what I had. I'll definitely keep working this way every now and again, and hopefully come back and work on/from the pieces I produced.

'Hello Beautiful' Brief: More Observational Work.

After doing my found imagery collages, I decided to focus on the other two words I hadn't used, 'Growth' and 'Life'. For this I thought I would do some object drawing with plants and flowers, since I thought they fit those words very nicely, and they're beautiful and resilient! I was focusing mainly on shapes and leaves.

I started with this, still trying to keep the work in minimal colours, I think this spread works because of the masking tape, I'm not sure why! 

Some flower studies in different drawing techniques, I'm particularly enjoying the green felt tip and the black fineliner! 

I wasn't sure about this but it's growing on me! I think the masking tape and cut out silhouettes work well, it was the scans and placement I wasn't sure about. 

I did a very simple plain fineliner study, then picked out details and etched them into the page with scissors, revealing them with shoe polish. I love the texture this creates. I want to keep on this track, as I think there is much more I can do with it and I'm enjoying the outcomes. 

'Make Your Mark' brief: Observational work.

I'm nearing the end of the project, and have been experimenting with more observational work, and the idea of having all the badges on one page (like previously). I've been working with mixed materials and just trying out different layouts on the page. Here are two badges in continuous line/collage. I really like both of these, I think the image on the right is stronger, with the little bit of black on white imagery.

The next two are mixed, one is all the badges collectively, and the other is a simple observational image of my hands, bringing it back to the previous project idea. I love the card outline in the first image.

This is quite a short post, but I thought I should show little bits of progress in between. I spoke to my tutor about rounding up the project, and we talked about doing little picture books, and looking at both the badges/hands idea (why I included both). I think it's a great idea and finalising both main ideas would be a good way to finish this project for me. 

Fine Art: Experimental Drawing: Artist Research

Recently in the Fine Art block we've been experimenting with different and unusual ways of drawing/mark making. We've been trying out everything from ink and stick, card and wash, to thread and sponging shoe polish! In conjunction with this we've been researching artists who also choose to use experimental methods to create their work.

The first artist I looked at was Gavin Turk. I was surprised by the fairly large range of work his has. Turk uses all sorts of different materials to create his work. From polystyrene, tea staining, footprints, neon lights and newspaper cutouts, egg shells and more! I just really enjoyed looking through this work and exploring the different techniques he's included.

The next artist I looked at was Jane Grisewood. My favourite work was the performance pieces she does, exploring time and memory with continuous line drawing and repetition. I have never heard of something like this being done, where the artist creates the work there and then as a piece, so for me this was new and a very interesting take on drawing.

Fine Art: 'Transform' -Structure and experimental drawing.

We were given long strips of paper and instructed to manipulate this paper, by folding or crumpling, any which way in order to transform the shape in some way. I chose to create a neat triangular structure at one end, and crumple the paper at the other -as if the structure was unravelling in some way.

From these we then took clean strips, and experimented with sponging, painting, stencilling and scoring, following the lines of our paper and recreating them with shoe polish. 

We also added masking tape for collage/cover up. I found this quite difficult, the shoe polish wasn't very dark and without scoring the paper it would always come up the same shade! It was a difficult medium to work with, but once we had done three and we put them together, I think they worked quite nicely as one piece.

After this we produced some pieces using tape, collage and thread. I preferred this task a lot more, we haven't had to use thread yet and I hadn't ever really drawn with it. My favourite combination was the green thread over masking tape (the strip on the right), the colours and material really complemented each other.