This week's homework was to create a still life of items that represented us as a person - our personality, thoughts and feelings at the time, personal objects, etc. We then had to make 3 drawings of the scene, using line, tone, and then a mix of both.
Setting up the still life was enjoyable as you had to think about which objects you would be interested to draw, and how the composition would look on the page. The arrangement of objects would also have an effect on the impact of the final drawing so I spent a little while moving, rearranging and studying my still life.
Once I was happy with it, I began the drawings. The first was a continuous line drawing, and we had to try to look at our drawing as little as possible. I thought this would be harder than I actually found it, so I was pleasantly surprised. I thought that having to keep the pencil/pen on the page would make it difficult to get proportions and perspective correct, but in actual fact I found it easier as you couldn't really be too fussy about it, so had to just trust your eye and focus on what you could really see. The continuous line also gave some interesting layering effects when it crossed objects over one another. I was able to bring some experience from the previous homework into the task, by looking at the negative space to improve the accuracy of the drawing.
Next we had to produce the same drawing using only tone, in a variety of pencils, so I chose 2B, 4B and 6B. The 6B worked very well for the darkest areas while the 2B let me add some nice mid-tones. This was another exercise that I expected to find hard, because sometimes when defining an object only using tone it is easy to lose proportions. Although it was challenging, and required lots of double checking, I found the exercise a lot of fun and am pleased with my outcome! I tried to use as little outlining as possible so that it really was the tone that defined the objects, and only used line for really straight edges such as on the book. The tone makes the drawing jump from the page and is successful at creating a 3D illusion.
The final drawing was combined tonal and line drawing, and I chose to use coloured oil pastels as they're not something I often use but I felt the vivid colour and texture would lend itself nicely to the task. This is the drawing I am probably happiest with, because I think I'd got my confidence up by this point and was a lot bolder with my mark making which shows in the end result. The colours I chose work really nicely together and I think that I captured the highlights and shadows pretty effectively. I started out with tone as suggested, and then defined the outlines more later on with heavier oil pastel and continuous pencil line, which I find successful in breaking up areas of tone and giving a stark contrast.
I found this exercise great at improving observational skills, and working on perspective and proportion using negative space, as well as continuing our studies of tone and line. One thing that I still think I need to work on is my composition, as the images still remain in corners or sides of the page and especially with the line drawing, can get a little lost, which lessens the impact of the image.
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