Part 3 Project 2 - Experiments with mark making

"Make yourself some drawing tools by attaching pencils or pieces of charcoal to the ends of bamboo canes or similar. "

I share my house with a cat and a dog who sit on anything on the floor so it seemed logical to do this exercise outside. Drawing standing up changed the perspective of familiar views. I started looking over the fence to a collection of buckets and barrows balanced on my neighbours aviary which aren't in view from a seated position.

The first drawing is in charcoal. It wasn't too hard to draw straight lines but the bushes were tricky until I found that I could make small flicking marks but using the natural bow in my sticks which were branches from an overgrown fir tree. The dark area above the aviaries became messy and overworked.

Adding colour corrected this. I've tried to keep it simple but I think the pattern of the garden fences is boring and ill described. The shed worked quite well. I mixed coloured pencils, water-soluble crayons  and felt tips but had to remove one of the green felt tips as the mark was too overpowering for the other gentler colours.

In search of a more interesting subject and composition I made some drawings in my sketchbook

The view of the backs of neighbouring houses was the best composition

This time I drew with a 4B carpenters pencil which doesn't seem soft enough to be 4B then added stronger lines with a regular 4B pencil. I like the wobbliness of the lines and the way I have been forced to be simple and decisive in my line making rather than scribble hopefully.

The bricks are a variety of shades so I used a mixture of coloured pastels which are too bold and dominate the rest of the drawing.

I added highlights with white conte attached to the stick

added more pastel and then used a broom to blend the colours by sweeping. By this point the original pencil lines were very feint so I attached a paintbrush to my stick and redrew the main outlines in black ink.

I'm still not happy with the dark bricks so I used blue purple and green pastels to darken the roofs.

Which made the sky look bland so I used blue white and yellow pastels in sweeping strokes before the pastels crumbled to nothing.

Has it become too overworked now?

Reflection: What happens when you break the relationship between your brain and the marks you make in this way? 

I'm not convinced that this exercise does break this relationship. As with using any different tools it changes the way I make marks but my brain is very much still in control.  The media dictates what the drawing is capable of, the level of control is just different. To work with the long sticks I found that I needed to physically move around the drawing to make the marks that I wanted with the level of control that I had. I don't think the drawings are particularly good but they're not bad drawings either, they made me be more decisive but also more open to the part that the media plays in making a drawing. An artist responds to the image they want to create and constantly re-evaluates the way that the drawing is shaping up as it develops. They are made better drawings because I have less sensitive control and have to work more freely and respond more openly to my subject.