Project 3 Review

I have found this project a real challenge.  Prior to this I have mainly drawn in pencil and had my eraser handy at all times.  With the materials I have been using in this project I was stuck with my first effort. Considering my eraser dependence I am quite pleased with the results. 

There are some things that define me and one of them liking to know exactly where I am.  So it's come as a bit of a surprise to find that good things can come out of a more random approach.  For instance my dip pen gave me lovely aubergines but I didn't know where I was going with it when I started.  Generally I liked the dip pens because they gave me some say in the shape of the mark I made (the aubergine was made with an italic nib).  Felt pens were much more limiting and I didn't like the colours as much.

I was worried about the line drawing exercise but in the end happy with the result.  Once again there's nowhere to hide.  In fact, having no colour lends a drama to the image and it made me look more carefully at the marks on the branch and work out how best to portray them.

I find hatching hard work and I get little by way of satisfaction from it because my results are poor.  I find that I can create more texture and depth if my marks are more free. That is demonstrated by my final conker image.

Marks that worked for me

This is a crop of my ink drawing of vegetables.  I used long, curved strokes for the aubergine and it gave a shiny, roundness that used the white negative space as highlights.  The tomato isn't as good because it has less variety of mark.  I had trouble with the cut tomato but the small, swishy marks seemed to capture the texture of the flesh.

The crops above show how I made a continuous line to represent the different textures on a broken branch. The vertical lines have a roundness that shows the cracks on the bark and the round marks are the hard lichen growing on it.  I used the same random marks on my second conker and found it gave some life to the image.

Composition

I have found my composition skills improving now that I have a bit of background knowledge.  I ask myself questions as I arrange my objects and that helps me to get pleasing results.  Simple things like overlapping items makes such a big difference to the cohesion of a composition and allows negative space to have a shape that can be determined.  My first composition of vegetables was uninteresting but I was able to correct it with a bit more thought.

I'm finding that the course is moving very fast and wondering if I'm doing enough consolidation work.  My deadline beckons and I've a holiday during October.  I'd like to have some time to look around the corners as I did in Part 1.