Assignment 3

At first I was a bit stuck with settling on a subject. I started with some preliminary sketches of my garden from the bedroom.

It's not a very exciting view and I didn't think I could sustain my interest for the whole project so I took trip to Gadebridge Park to draw the skatepark. It was dull, cold and wet so no actual skateboarders but I like the combination of the park and church with the urban skatepark.

I took a lot of photos for reference and returned home to draw some skateboarders from the internet, (there's also drawings here of the only other human inhabitant in the park when I was there, a man in a long coat who looked like he'd lost something)

 Initially this view interested me,

but I wasn't sure how to fit in trees and keep it interesting so I did some more thumbnails.

This is my preferred view. The idea is that your eye is swept round from the ramp and the skateboarder up to the church in the trees....

I had some issues with the ramp. Here is the photo which I based it on.

First rough in charcoal doesn't give the feeling of depth.

Nor does the second, but the marker drawing below is getting a bit closer to what I imagined.

This is ink drawn with a brush. It's the wrong sort of paper so it buckled a lot but the trees are lively. I did think I might do a wash of blue for the background then draw over it.

This was coloured pencil to work out colour values but I liked the effects of overlaid colours so I chose water soluble crayons for my final piece.

The dark of the ramp in the foreground is a problem because it wants to dominate the scene. I kept to a limited palette of light blue, dark blue, pale, medium and dark green to give it consistency and coherence. I like the effect of the different coloured crayons overlaid on the paper. I think there is some feeling of depth but not as much as I'd hoped for. I like the back part with the trees. Is it better cropped?

Probably not.The skate ramp was more interesting to draw and I'd like to expand that part of the drawing more without the constraints of the brief wanting natural objects as part of the landscape. I also find it hard to keep the energy in a drawing that is A2 size, my initial thumbnail was more lively.
Returning to an earlier idea did a background watercolour wash on A3 paper and moved the skateboarder to try and give more energy.

The colours aren't bold enough in this version and it's becoming overworked (and the paper tore when I took it out of the pad)
Drawing the skate ramp lead me to become bit obsessed with the shapes made by scaffolding. I did a lot of sketches, here are a selection. 

The lines on the right are made by tracing the shadows cast by a birdcage, those on the left and in the top page are drawn from photos I found on the internet as its been a busy few weeks during the day and I couldn't make time to draw from life in the daylight.
In the end I made up my scaffolding drawing in charcoal. I find it very hard to draw a long straight line but using a ruler is too harsh.

I added connectors to hold the poles together and some ivy climbing up the pole.

Then used water-soluble crayons to add colour I wanted to avoid true to life colours, I feel I'm a slave to reality sometimes and I need to break away.

You can see the lines left by my earlier attempts to get the poles in the right place when I was drawing with charcoal, they only partly rubbed out. To make a more coherent image I "coloured in" the background with light blue water-soluble crayon using straight strokes to get an even cover of colour. My plans to soften the colour with water but I like the effect so I'm going to stop here before I mess it up...

Unfortunately while photographing the drawing I found that the perspective looks better upside down!