Week 7: Working in Layers

This week was another that I was really excited to take part in, as I hadn't worked with paint yet due to missing last week's session, and it's a medium that I enjoy. Something that I frequently try to experiment with when painting is working in layers, but often find it difficult especially knowing where to start. Therefore, this session was hugely useful as a starting point!

To begin the session we made a series of very quick 1 minute drawings in close succession, all on the same page. This gave us a really nice composition of pose practices, as well as serving as a good warm up exercise. The life drawing for homework had definitely got me more used to having to make drawings of figures very quickly, and I could really feel this practice helping me during the task. I found I was a lot more confident with my mark making and knowing how to approach certain positions than I had been in the first few sessions, and it was very inspiring to notice the improvement!

We then made 3 more studies of 5 minutes each, again on one page. I enjoyed drawing these, as I had time to add some tone and bring them to life a little more. Having more confidence with my faster drawings meant that my results on the whole were proportional and full of movement and life. Comparing this to my early life drawing technique, which was very stiff, these actually reflect a real person.

After these exercises, we moved onto our first painting. I chose to use goache for this, as I was feeling eager to use vivid colours and wanted to include some texture, which needed thicker paint. Ideally I would have chosen acrylic, but unfortunately I didn't have any with me. I hadn't used goache much before, but found it an enjoyable, smooth paint to work with. I liked that it blended more like watercolour, but still dried opaque and textured like acrylic. This meant that I could layer colours well. This painting required us to use two contrasting colours including white, so I chose a bright green and purple.

For the first 10 minutes of the painting we blocked in darker tones with one colour, then for the next 10 we went in with lighter tones with the other colour. I chose the purple for dark tones and green for lighter mid tones. The white was added last for highlights. My choices worked well, because they stood out beautifully from the paper and the white, without being too dark that they couldn't be layered. As a result, I am very pleased with my result. I ended up leaving some paper showing through on areas of the figure, which at first I thought had been a mistake but later looked again and think it's very effective. It links the figure nicely with the plain background and adds an extra layer of tone which isn't necessarily highlight but appears considerably lighter. It gives the figure a very 3D effect.

30 MINS / COLOUR TONAL STUDY / 2 COLOURS OF GOACHE AND PENCIL

The next painting had the same restrictions, but this time I chose orange and blue to go with the white. I liked how the complementary colours of green and purple worked last time, so that's why I chose two complementary colours again. I decided to switch to watercolour, which allowed me to create some thinner layers and looser control of the paint. Something that I liked about using these two colours is that the thinner paint overlaid to create a new colour; a kind of olive green. This picks out certain areas quite nicely, adding an unintentional mid tone which is consistent with the colour scheme of the rest of the image! I framed the figure using the two colours I'd chosen for shadow and light, which I feel is effective at giving some context and projecting the figure from the page. I do however, wish that I hadn't changed my technique from the painting before; because of leaving paper showing last time, I decided this time that I would fill every space within the figure with colour. This does help make the body look more solid - however I feel that it also flattens the shape as the white is hard to pick out and therefore highlights are a little lost. I compensated for this by darkening some of the shadows, and it's by no means a bad piece in my opinion, but it's an example of overworking a piece that didn't need so much paint.

30 MINS / COLOUR TONAL STUDY / 2 COLOURS OF WATERCOLOUR AND PENCIL

CLOSE UP OF STUDY / I feel this area is particularly strong in terms of tonal contrast and highlights!

A further example of this is the next painting, which I feel is probably my weakest of the session. This painting didn't have any colour restrictions, so we could use however many and whichever colours we wanted. I didn't want to lose the impact of a simplified palette, as I liked how this worked in the first two, so I only chose three colours and then white, Again, I used watercolour, which I don't think was a good choice here, as it ended up just creating a light wash on some areas, and I didn't find I could build it up as well as thicker paint.

30 MINS / COLOUR TONAL STUDY / THREE COLOURS OF WATERCOLOUR AND PENCIL

Nevertheless, I tried to make the best of it, and some parts are pretty successful - for instance, I like the foot tucked under the body, where you can still see some loose pencil showing through. This is an example where the watercolour could work well if better handled. I also like the bent arm, where the elbow is nicely defined with a splodge of deep red and protrudes from the rest of the body in a good example of foreshortening. However, other areas are lost in colour as the colours are all too similar, so the highlights don't show very well. It's a shame because it was a nice open pose!

CLOSE UP OF STUDY / This is one of the areas I still quite like, showing that the painting has potential and I can learn from it for next time.

After my disappointment with the previous painting, I wanted to make sure I didn't make the same mistakes with the final one, so I reverted back to goache. Instead of similar colours, which I'd learnt to avoid, I went back to using  complementary colours, and chose a blue and ochre brown. I did choose a third colour, a kind of teal, but reserved this only for the background. I also used white for highlights. This pose was nice to paint, with lots of tonal contrast. I didn't try to fill in all areas of the figure, learning from my mistakes, and immediately the outcome became stronger. The background works well I think, because it has enough similarity to the other colours to give a sense of consistency, without everything else blending back into it.

30 MINS / COLOUR TONAL STUDY / THREE COLOURS OF GOACHE AND PENCIL

CLOSE UP OF STUDY / I'm very pleased with this example of tone especially, where I managed to capture the gracefulness of the foot using only tone and very little line!

I found the technique very effective. I really loved having the time just to focus on one tone at a time, because you could really think about where you were putting it and which was accurate, etc. I learnt lots about colour schemes, as well as highlighting, mark making and layering.

Week 6: Homework

Cafe Drawing

Unfortunately I missed the lesson on this week's Monday; however I was still able to complete the homework task to practice life drawing outside of class.

We had to go to public places such as around campus, cafes, parks, buses, trains, etc, and make drawings of the people in those places. As people out and about are almost never standing still it makes the task a challenge, but very useful.

As with most tasks, it took me a few attempts to warm up, but once I started drawing I found there were lots of people I could draw. I ended up going out on two separate occasions to complete the task, which was nice because it meant I could go to lots of different locations and see lots of different settings to draw people in. I think that most of my drawings were successful at capturing the busy day to day life of people in public. The mark making is bold and fluid as a result of trying to get down as much information as possible in such a short space of time, which works well for me because if I try to add too much detail I have a tendency to draw from my head instead of from what I can see, and then I overwork things. So with these drawings I am happy that they retained the sense of life and movement that comes with loose sketches.

Something that I do sometimes struggle with with life drawing in this way is that you don't have time to really measure proportions, so a lot of it relies on estimating, based on what your eyes can see. This means that some of my drawings aren't massively accurate. I think this is something that simply comes with time, as you practice skills and eventually it becomes second nature. In any case, sometimes drawings that have an element of distortion or wonkiness can even be more effective than perfect copies, because they have character and charm to them.

This final drawing is a quick sketch I made of my flatmate while she was lying on the bed. It gave me a good opportunity to practice foreshortening outside the class and I think I managed it quite well!

Bristol Zoo Drawing Trip

On the Monday of Worcester Week (31/10/16) a group of art students from various courses, although mainly illustration, took a trip to Bristol zoo in order to practice our life drawing skills. Animals are unpredicatable, fast-moving and often very challenging to draw with their many strange forms, habits and movements. For these reasons I was both looking forward to the trip but also a little unsure about how my drawing would go, having to be so fast paced and bold. There wouldn't be time to worry about proportion or accuracy, I would just have to trust my eyes.

The trip was a brilliant day. Any worries that I may have had soon disappeared once I started drawing and got into the swing of things. Like any activity it takes some time to warm up, but the trick I learned was just to keep going and pushing through any drawings that didn't go to plan, because I knew that if I made a large quantity of work, I would definitely have something worthwhile to pick out of it. I also prefer drawing faster and slightly more messily, so I found the exercise to suit me perfectly!