Recently I have had difficulty in drawing, and I believe the issue for me is the medium and my lack of comfort with it, namely working in pencil. I prefer working gesturally and although I could quite comfortably continue working in loose mediums like charcoal, I do feel that I need to improve my skills on a technical, realistic level, and so I have been trying to persevere with pencil work. However, this led to frustration and with the initial drawing attempts that I was making in pencil, the results were unsatisfactory and abortive. As time was running out to complete this stage of the work for the day, I decided I need to have something solid to work with so I quickly went back to doing a quick charcoal drawing, drawing fast and loose and although the results were not as I would have hoped, I felt more prepared to go onto the next stage.
We had a selection of medium available to us to use, and today also marked the beginning of using colour in tone to develop the image. We had the option of using inks for the first time, which I found a very exciting notion, as I felt this could continue in the gestural expressive style that I favour. There were only three shades to use, which created an interesting limitation to work around, and the colours were quite strong so I knew from the outset that the results would be striking at least. We had available to us Prussian blue, crimson (more pink a shade than I expected) and brown, and I spent a good deal of time experimenting with the use of water to thin out and great variations in tone. There is definitely a lot more I would like to do with inks and the piece that I began in the session needs more work, which I aim to continue on with outside of the designated session time before next week.
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| Top left to right, abortive pencil drawings (second of which I used as a base for a quick test of the inks before progressing onto canvas), below is the quick 'emergency' charcoal drawing with some of the inks mixed in - resulting in a blotchy mess. Right is a quick sketch in graphite, with inks overlaying - more successful. |
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| Canvas piece as it exists at the moment, focussing on models face and shoulder. The inks are overworked and need toning down to an extent, and once the piece is to a higher standard I will take a better photograph with my DSLR. Background elements in coloured chalk, mixed with water by hand to experiment in tone (not successful in my view). |
