Sunday 6 December 2015

Drawing 2 - Part 1 Project 1 - Observational Drawing

This project asked for a drawing of an unpromising subject, I seem to have already drawn nearly all the unpromising subjects in my house at various times. I started by drawing the draining board, a subject which I visited in Drawing 1.
I wanted to use ink and coloured pencil to be bolder with my drawing. A sort of still life version of Veronica Lawlor's drawings but it's too measured and it was too much a conventional still life set up.
It does work a bit better cropped.

I struggle with proportions if I try and draw off the edge of the page so I find it easier to crop once I've finished although I don't think I'm bold enough.
There is a corner of my dining room/studio/office that contains the fridge (it's a small house)
I think this is suitably inconspicuous.

Pencil

Some sketchbook drawings to explore the subject. I became rather interested in the way the keys hang and the shapes they make.
Pencil, coloured pencil and watercolour
 Some photos of details

fibre tipped pens with added water

My tutor for Drawing 1 felt that the arrangement of my sketchbook studies was often superior to my finished pieces so I approached this exercise with that in mind. I'm sure I've seen artists employing a fractured viewpoint but I'm struggling to find good examples. I was pointed towards Lisa Milroy's A Day in the Studio but I think it is more like a graphic novel. The Cubists mixed viewpoints. I'm trying to understand Picasso but I don't get his work yet. I prefer Georges Braque and The Billiard Table has a similar multi faceted approach.

This was my underlying pencil drawing. I used a nice A3 Seawhite drawing book but the drawings on the reverse side of the paper show through. I started by drawing the magnets and leaflets on the front of the fridge to use as a background then drew elements that interested me over them.  The various elements are linked by the circles from the apples and the red nose from the fridge

To make them stand out I used black ink and coloured pencils. I'm not happy with the way the inked lines dominate the drawing, darker pencil might have been better. I'm not sure about the panda fridge magnet at the bottom left but I was trying not to edit the image or the content too much. 

Like the earlier draining board drawing it's much better cropped


Reflection
Have I moved far enough from my original subject? Probably not but I do think the final drawing is a lot more interesting than the original subject promised. Having just finished the long final project in Drawing 1 going back to shorter projects feels a little strange. With time I think I could take this further. It could be drawn on a coloured background or just with the circles filled in in red or another suitable colour. I didn't think too deeply about positioning of the elements within the final drawing and on reflection I wonder if the basket should be moved to the left. The colours could do with being bolder too and maybe less representative of what I see. What stops me from doing all these things is that I feel myself starting to become a bit precious about this project and I think I could easily go to deep and draw the life out of it. Also there are another four projects in this Assignment and I'm never going to get to the end if I don't let this one go.
Yes the drawing is still about the original subject but viewed in a more interesting way so I think that is being creative. Maybe I've used enough space to keep the drawing open but I could have made it more busy by crowding the objects together so that they further loose their identity, do I want that? I'm not keen on the idea. I quite like the idea of feint drawings of the objects, maybe in pencil, behind a bolder drawing but I do like the clean lines of the picture I've made.
On balance I'm reasonably happy with the picture so I'm leaving it here but I welcome comments.

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