drawing

today's drapery study/drawing. I'm happy with how the fabric drapes over the edge of the box. though now I see the photo I can see parts in the middle & top that don't match reality & the tones are bit out but hopefully they still have the feel of draping fabric. back to painting next week.

May 28 2016

Drapery study - May 7th

we went along to the Tracing Materiality exhibition on Sunday. the artists had been doing some continuous drawings on large rolls of paper, as well as wall drawings, and working with wax. I'm going to try make it to the talk on the 20th march too. I loved all the work! and there was a stack of drawing books for me to chase up also :)

after the still life, I worked on a drapery study - I keep typing this as drawpery! I had my "aha" moment towards the end of the second week's class, so will start a new one next week. I had been trying to draw more expressively and scribble and smudge with my finger, but my teacher said to draw individual lines as they convey more information. individual lines is my natural way of drawing, so I'll go back to this next week. it was hard to erase some of the original marks I'd made. I was getting the hang of it by the end of week 2's class, so will practice more next week

week2 - March 5 2016:

I changed from painting to drawing at my saturday morning art class. first up was a still life study

we went to life drawing class at 107 projects tonight. Syd Mead said that if you can draw people, you can pretty much draw anything (paraphrasing), so I'd like to practice more. I'm happy with a couple of these. I was trying rough outline of shapes and concentrating on shading the shadows. one lady asked about the other colours so I showed her the pastels. J's lines are amazing - I need to practice looser lines, and seeing & drawing volumes. and find my line at all. these are 5mins, 10mins, 15min poses - I'd arrived late so missed the 1-2 min poses. my proportions are out most of the time so this needs improvement. the model walked around later and looked at everyone's drawings. he said he thought my last one of him "everything is expanding", so hopefully that's a good thing?

adding them all here, so if I keep going throughout the year, I can look back and (hopefully) see improvements, and my line. these are charcoal (vine + thicker), white charcoal/pastel and coloured conte crayons

tonight I went to a drawing class with Daniel O'Toole aka Ears, a Sydney based painter and now video artist. Ears is one of my favourite Sydney artists and I'm lucky to have one of his paintings. now I can see how contour based his works are. the class was held at his studio called "Higher Ground Studio" in Leichardt & was lots of fun. we did some mark making exercises to different styles of music, drawing different words, blind contour drawings & contour drawings where we added shading/colours to the shapes, drawing by rubbing out the charcoal using putty rubber, making a variety of marks, drawing a landscape with our marks and we finished up with a collaborative painting of a brown, flattened box. I only had butchers paper instead of cartridge paper so some are a bit rough. we used mostly charcoal and ink with a touch of coloured house paint.

http://earstotheground.net is Ears' website. apart from amazing paintings, he has also uploaded some of his sketchbook pages which are pretty inspiring. some of the line/contour drawings remind me of Carla Sonheim's ones and class exercises where we try to draw animals. Ears draws faces — there's a lot of portraits with masks/faces in his paintings
http://earstotheground.net/Sketch-book

I'm reading "Drawing Projects - an exploration of the language of drawing" by Mick Maslen and Jack Southern as recommended by Sandra Flower, one of the OCA Textiles tutors. it looks like a very thorough book with some theory as well as many practical examples and exercises and analysis of artists' work. at the start of the book is as section "What we know and what we see". whilst this might seem to be a basic, easy concept, it's one that I have forgotten so am including a couple of quotes here.

prior to this, the authors talk about how children draw what they see - "the drawing incorporates the child's knowledge and experience [of the pond] as a whole body experience perceived through all of their senses, and not just through their eyes, or from a single point of view. In some ways, this is children's drawings at its best, and perhaps it exemplifies something of what Picasso was searching for when he is reputed to have said that he had spent 80 years learning to draw like a child." (page 10).

as part of the work on my "bee" theme, and as part of the closing assignment for "Year of the Fairy Tale" illustration class I've been taking this year, to learn more painting techniques, I'm doing an illustration for a Fairy Land zine on magic animals. of course I chose the bee. but as "bee" was already taken, I decided to be more specific and chose the "Australian sugarbag bee" aka Tetragonula Carbonaria bee, which is one of the native bees of Australia. this is a stingless bee, though it can give you a bite instead.

collating info here about the sugarbag bee as part of my research. another Australian bee I like is the blue-banded bee. there are a number of coloured bees native to Australia, which are different to the introduced yellow coloured honey bee that everyone is used to seeing.

for the illustrated page, I need to write a line about why this is a magic sugarbag bee, and draw a matching picture.

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Australian bee websites:

Sugarbag Bees blog http://www.sugarbag.net

Sugarbag Bees facebook page https://www.facebook.com/sugarbagbees

Aussie Bee http://www.aussiebee.com.au

Kin Kin Native Bees http://www.nativebees.com.au

I've been trying out my new artgraf water soluable graphite tonight with another drawing of a bee for my theme. I think it's sometimes called watercolour graphite. I put water in the lid and found my paintbrush and tried it out. I haven't got the bee shapes right yet but I love the variations in lightness and darkness of the graphite. there's even a slight shimmer and sparkle to it in this dim light. will see if it's still there in the morning daylight.

I shouldn't have tried the background wash though.. :( don't like it atm

another in (hotel room) biro practicing hatching (with wonky bee shape still)

a few more bee sketches in different media — I'm thinking of trying some of these in stitch (a cross between junko oki's work and jude hills' work such as this circle & the final piece in 'considering weave' — my own interpretation of it) and also as the fabric manipulation exercises for assignment 3. (to save time, and work on theme practice plus exercises at the same time).

basket weave for eyes

plus some other general sketches — I'm also trying to practice sketching things from my day or local area. some are done in a small notebook whilst out and about.

I still haven't separated my theme book from regular sketch book — must work on this. it's just more convenient to put everything into one book..

general sketches:

i think I've been improving with some of my sketching.. or rather seeing. I think i'm starting to see things differently - the shapes and lines rather than only the overall shape and outline. still a lot of practice to do, and there's still plenty of fails, but when i concentrate more on looking and seeing and not the drawing, I end up being happier with the drawings. something to remember going forwards..

update 22/11/2014: see this later post on draw what you see and not what you know

another exercise I learned from one of Carla Sonheim's classes, is to practice seeing shapes — animals and other things, in the cracks and lines and shadows on the footpath and other places. I think this might be a type of pataphysical drawing exercise too.

collating some of them here — most a "imaginary animals" or "blobimals" as it's fun to draw them, and they seem to be everywhere once you start looking! it's like finding animals in the clouds.

some I've done:

and some shapes I've collected and am yet to draw the "blobimals":
some are obvious, and others less so..

sometimes I don't have my drawing materials with me so I've started making quick drawings on the ipad. collating them here..

some are freehand scribbles / warm up drawings and others I trace photos on different layers — selecting which lines/details to include in the drawing.

I read about the "brushes" ipad app so I've been trying it out this weekend. it allows you to draw in layers. so far I've been roughly tracing photos from my photos collection to practice and get a feel for drawing lines and objects & people. I know we should do more freehand drawing, but i get quite disheartened that mine don't look like the original, that I don't feel like doing any more. with the tracings, i can see the image coming through and it's teaching me to see the shapes better, and to select which lines and shapes and shadings to include and which to leave out. i think this is half the battle of drawing - deciding what to include and what to discard that still gets your message across. I'm using my finger to draw with and still getting the hang of the app's brushes too, so even though I'm tracing, it's still not looking exactly like the original. but hopefully it's training my hand eye co-ordination a bit (more than not drawing at all). here's the first attempts.