Drawing 2 - Assignment 2

"Make a drawing of a subject of your choice using the subject itself, or tools constructed from the subject, dipped in ink or paint." 
I share my house with my daughters cockateil and a budgie who was dumped outside a vets and I often find their feathers when I clean them out so it was a logical step to use the feathers to paint a bird. The birds are difficult to draw because they move so much so I practiced a bit by taking some photos to work from in my sketchbook using fineliner and felt tip, softened with water.

Then did some rough drawings from life using a multicoloured pencil (somehow my dog crept onto the page too).

For guidance I looked back at the RSPB Guide to Drawing Birds which has some excellent drawings. A lot of the pictures are of static birds rendered very carefully. John Busby and Eric Ennion managed to keep the pictures lively using a few well placed lines. David Measures is better know for painting butterflies in flight, he worked in loose watercolour and his fingers to suggest rather than define his subject. I also Googled bird drawings and found Charles David Viera and this is the sort of thing I want to achieve with my bird pictures.

Experiments with feathers, first with drawing ink, using the end of the feather as a quill. Then the body of the feather as a brush and to make a feather shaped print.

On the left I tried dipping the feathers in crushed charcoal to make a print which was too feint to be much use,

and on the right watercolour paint which seemed to have the most potential so I tested it on some newspaper, a paper bag that had contained bread and a scrap of sugar paper. 

The fluid patch of green on the sugar paper is a nice shape, grass in sunlight.

I tried mixed bright colours on proper watercolour paper.

I like the way the feathers apply paint in a random fashion so that the resultant image owes a lot to chance. This makes me work more freely, the only way to paint the bird is to suggest the shape so it is particularly well suited to the movement of birds in flight.

I had fun painting birds from my memory/imagination.

I think this picture is a bit overworked.

This is my favourite image but I don't know if you would recognise the bird if you weren't told first. Is the sea in the foreground a bit weak?

I did a few more birds to see if I could work into them more, and have more background without loosing the freshness and immediacy of the original idea.

I'm not pleased with these pictures but I have obviously subconsciously referenced this painting

I still prefer the seabird.

To explore this project more fully I made some drawings of the eucalyptus tree in my garden which is  heavily shedding its bark at the moment. Van Gogh drew and painted trees beautifully responding to the shapes of the trunks and branches and Cezanne uses a great colour pallet which I have failed to reproduce in the picture below.

Black ink and gouache

This has become overworked as I tried to get the leaves right but I like the effect of the ink and gouache on the trunk. I have drawn this tree many times from most angles but I discovered a different view so I did a sketchbook study.

I used the pieces of bark which peels off the trunk to reveal a smooth surface. Also sticks and leaves from the tree and the leaves from the strawberry plants that grow beneath it. However the finished drawing has lost the tilt of the original idea because I was drawing outside close to my subject and lost perspective.

Sepia ink and gouache

This is dull and would have looked better at an angle.

So I had another go.

This version was done in 20 minutes before I had to go to work, then embellished a little with leaves when I got home again though I had to work indoors as it was raining and the light was going. The angle is better and as time was short there was less risk of overworking but I don't think that it is solid enough beneath the tree so I added some more and overdid it instead.

It has also lost some of the freshness of the earlier drawing. Running the base under the tap (rain, watering the tree...) didn't move the gouache much but did soften the sepia ink a bit and made the whole thing rather ill defined.

The best version of the tree is the first one but needs to be rotated and cropped.

I had an idea that the drawing might work better on a dark background so I did a test drawing with water-soluble crayon on Canford black paper.

It's not as striking as I had hoped but maybe that's because the crayon lacks intensity so I thought I may as well do a full drawing using the bark and twigs and acrylic paint. I abandoned representative colour though I didn't manage to make it as brilliant as Kandinsky

It still lacks intensity and the structure of the tree is loosing something with repeated drawings (it's still raining outside so I can't work directly from my subject.)  The yellow acrylic on black paper gives the right sort of green (my pallet was Cadmium red and yellow and raw umber). Since I have acrylic paints out I went back to white watercolour paper and had another go (I added some Phthalo blue to deepen the tone) .

In all these drawings there are elements that I like, the bark on the picture above feels right and the red foliage works (I gave up on the strawberry plants) but I haven't managed to properly convey the curve of the branch that comes towards the viewer. The layout of the higher branches is weak.

Reviewing the work ready to post to my tutor I feel that I have dismissed this tree too quickly

Its on A3 portrait close to the top so there is space to write a caption beneath and some writing around the sides.

" Imagine if trees gave off Wi-Fi signals. We would be planting so many trees and we’d probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe." 

I think this may be attributed to Mary Walters. Sadly further research doesn't support trees as net oxygen producers (also here) and I don't like to propagate falsehoods.

However this eucalyptus tree is an alien species, but it still enhances my garden. In the current political climate where we potentially face exit from the European Union and there are elements within our society who distrust immigrants and seek to expel them it is a metaphor for what immigrants may have to offer. I just can't think of a suitable phrase at the moment so I kept it simple.