(SEMESTER TWO) Week 4: Life Model, Animals, Birds

This week Mel was joined by some stuffed creatures in glass display cases which raised a whole new set of challenges! It meant choosing compositions was a lot more complicated and allowed lots of experimentation with sizing and perspective.

Warm-up exercises - top left: 2 mins, top right: 5 mins for both,  bottom 3: 10 mins for all.

The warm ups helped me get a bit more confident with the subject matter before heading into the longer/more complicated full scene drawings. I made an effort to keep my lines loose and not worry too much about the proportions as this session was more focusing on texture, mark-making and composition!

10 minutes - continuous line & semi-blind

This is possibly my favourite of this week's drawings. I think the technique worked well with the subject matter in the way that it helped link the composition together and the whole image has a sense of fluidity. I even quite like the slight 'wonkiness' of the lines and the perspective, because I think it gives the simple line drawing a sense of life and movement.

LEFT: Mel and (3) animals - 5 minutes
RIGHT: Mel and (4) animals - 10 minutes

My first mistake with this piece was probably not doing each exercise on a separate piece of paper. It meant I was limited with space and couldn't work as expressively as I'd have liked. It also negatively affects the final look of each composition. I also struggled with timing, as you can see the left drawing was meant to be Mel and 3 animals while I only managed 1, and the right was meant to be Mel and 4 animals and I only managed 3. The right hand side is probably the better of the two, as it's less stylised and more accurate, as well as more finished; however it's still very lacking in tone and proportion.

Textured paper collage - 50 minutes

For this piece we used textures we had made at the start of the lesson, using paint & rollers and charcoal rubbings, to create the animals themselves and then arrange them in a composition. We were also told to include Mel but I decided against this as I was happy with having the animals larger, and I was more focused on them anyway as they are something we don't often get to reference from. It was a fun exercise being more hands on with cutting and collaging, and I enjoyed thinking about which textures would work best for each element of the picture. Surprisingly this took me the whole 50 minutes, as I found the cutting was very time consuming! Therefore the boxes had to be rushed a little and I'm not sure whether they have added anything positive to the composition. I felt it was important to include them though, to separate and frame the individual focal points, so I'm glad I didn't leave the background space empty.