Lots of drawings, what worked best?

I'm still reasonably pleased with my watercolour drawing from my first submission

and I like the liveliness of this drawing even though it's not what my tutor was looking for.

If I'm trying to do what he wanted then I think these are the best drawings

but both probably fall into the illustration category

and in response to his comments I have rewritten my statement

Artists Statement

Using loose flowing lines to convey a frozen moment in the swirling performance of the figure skater. The focus is on the person, a human being working as a machine. The surroundings are a blur, an unimportant background. The figure is glimpsed and incomplete, small and alone in the vast rink.

I want to use drawings as a way to make time stand still so that the uniqueness and beauty of the moment can be captured to be examined and fully appreciated. To do this, for this project, I choose to use ice skaters as my subject because they move rapidly, but in a predictable pattern with repetition. I have had plenty of opportunities to closely observe how they move, and as an amateur ice skater I have myself experienced many of the movements that I have drawn so that I can include my own feelings of how the pose works as well as how it looks to an audience. 

My interest is in the beauty to be found in ugly places and the effort of people to achieve that beauty. My drawings are meant to be contemporary, not historical, I am in the here and now, this is what I am seeing and recording, I don't feel able to comment on the past or look into the future. I fluctuate between wanting to record and expose the rigours of practice which the public never sees or to comment on the loneliness of the performer in front of the crowd, maybe the resultant image is a bit of both. We the viewers look on from the stability and relative comfort of the sides outside the barriers which contain the ice. We could be supportive and encouraging or pushy and domineering. Because we are outside the ice we have only our single window view to try and understand the complexities of the relationship between the skater and the ice, a world we cannot enter unless we are prepared to embrace the unpredictable and step onto the ice.

Before I started I looked at videos of ice skating on YouTube to try and break down the elements of action, and made drawing based on what I saw however I found that I made better drawings by using my memory and imagination which was based on my earlier visual studies.

My work has been influenced by my research into other practitioners, Rubens, Tim Stoner,  the carefully executed dance drawings of Karolina Szymkiewicz and the multiple overlaid lines of Jane Waller. Also the paper preparation techniques of Laura Ferguson.

I have treated every drawing as an experiment so the drawings weren't planned but were allowed to evolve, sometimes successfully, sometimes into a dead end.  The liveliest drawings happened when there is evidence of my search for the best line and when I didn't know how the figure was going to take shape or what they would be doing.  A variety of media was tested and this experiment with different media is an ongoing theme in my work.