Quick drawings outside

These two drawings were made quickly in a small park near where I live, quite early in the morning.

 I used the viewfinder for the first time, but found it rather awkward trying to hold it up while drawing. I'll just have to practise a bit more...

I also took photographs of the scenes, which I may use to add more detail later.

Just went back and added a bit more detail to the first drawing, working from the photograph...

Assignment Two - composition

This assignment piece brought together a few favoured items - the clam shell, the teasels and pinc cone - as well as some bright pink cyclamens and nice small vase.

I placed them on a check cloth, which as well as being quite decorative, proved to be a useful means of getting all the pieces in the right position on the page, using the check as a grid.

As the previous post relates, I experimented with some other media (ink and patel pencils) before settlmg here on watercolour pencil (without water). Although the colours are much fainter, I guess I still feel "safer" working in this medium as it's easier to repair mistakes.

I must have spent several days deciding on the composition, and then the actuall drawing has taken me three days. I'm not sure the final piece reflects the concentration and anguish that's gone into it!

What have I learned?

I think I've learned quite a lot during these first two parts of the course. But I've also forgotten a lot of it too. I have to keep reminding myself of all the other media I've used over the course, and the kinds of techniques (hatching, stippling) that I've worked through. I will need to bring some of these back into use as I get on to the next stage, as they obviously can all be part of the artist's toolkit. The temptation at the moment is just to focus on one thing and discard the rest.

Anyway, here's the assignment piece....

Cyclamen on a check tablecloth

This was a try-out for Assignment 2, and I was still experimenting with different media.

I put a few items on the tablecloth but focused initially on the cyclamen plant. I used some plum-coloured ink for the flowers, marker pen for the stems and then pastel pencils for the rest.

The main reason is that I wanted to reflect the brilliant pink of the flowers, which is hard to achieve with coloured pencils, which tend to be fainter.

Halfway through, I realised that the items I'd arranged had no real relation to each other and were just floating independently on the cloth, so I decided just to finish off the cyclamen, and then re-think what to put into the composition, and how to position each item.

Bowl of fruit in oil pastels

In this exercise, I took an onion, pear, apple and a sliced lemon, and packed them into a small blue enamel bowl.

I think the result shows up all the benefits of drawbacks of using oil pastels. I love the bright colours which give a very vibrant effect. But I have to admit I struggled to get any real subtlety of shading or colour, possibly because of the limited range of pastels I was using. However, I did try to merge some of the colours, especially in the pear, to create both shape and shade.

On the whole, I don't think it's very well drawn. The bowl is not round (as it should be) and the fruits don't really "sit" in the bowl - they float without really showing the relationship between them very well.

However, I quite like the bright colours which create a pleasant pattern of colour blocks.

Two herrings on a white plate

In this exercise I used watercolour pencils (but no water) to try and capture the silvery lustre of two herrings lying on a white plate under a fairly strong anglepoise lamp.

In reflection, it would have been more interesting if I'd bought three fish and if I'd been able to lay my hands on a patterned plate. That would have allowed me to use more colours.

I also worried at first that the fish were mainly silver, black and a bit of red. I decided to use some blue to convey the "silverniness" of the fish, and I think that has worked fairly well (better, anyway, than multiple shades of grey).

I think I might try adding water to spread the colours and to get deeper blocks of colour. I've not done it yet, as I was worried about ruining the picture irretrievably.