The next two exercises were really interesting. I often approach things from an objective perspective, trying to create accurate and figurative representations of what I see. I think this comes from my lack of confidence in my technical skills. The problem is that this feeds into my perfectionism, so being forced to tackle things from a subjective perspective was really useful for me.
Objective Drawing
I decided to draw my summer hat using fine-liners. This would allow me to practice my technique using line-work. I really wanted to improve my ability to hatch and cross-hatch. In the past I have tended to make them uniform lines.
I thought it would be interesting to try to make my hatching follow the contours. I think it really helped my capture the shape of the hat well.
There are things that I would have liked to be better: the brim is a little wonky, and the leather band's value could be darker. There were definitely places where it could have been a LOT neater!
I am a big fan of the work of Bryan Schiavone, who has a meticulous and adept skill with hatching and cross-hatching. I don't think my attempt is any where near as skilled as hers, but I think that her approach (and the approach needed to get those results) requires precision and a lot of patience.
One thing I am learning is that may not have the patience for that level of precision. I would prefer to work with my propensity to get bored (and subsequently loose) than to fight it. I do like detail though, so I am not sure how to reconcile that. One thought I have been having is to have looser or textural backgrounds, and then have finer aspects in the foreground (or wherever focus needs to be placed).
Subjective Drawing
For the next exercise, the task was to draw something subjectively - that is, represent its qualities, not focusing on an exacting likeness. I decided to choose my spectacles. It was a suggestion in the coursework, but I also really love my specs for the quality of their materials. They are extremely light, and that is due to the plastic they are made of. They have an almost translucent quality to them.
The first step was to try and capture the qualities of the spectacles more elaborately. So I used a basic spider mind map to capture my thoughts down.
Coming up with adjectives was harder than I thought. Depending on different ways of me looking at them, the spectacles took on different qualities.
In the end I decided to focus on the quality of the plastic itself, moving forward on the word frosted.
I put together a mood board to try and capture the quality of the glasses. It was hard to curate these, so as not to mix the quality I was trying to capture. I had the best success in images of coloured frosted glass, but I think some of the the more silky and shiny aspects also worked well in combination to give the right sense of texture and substance.
I started with a line drawing, not really caring too much about accuracy, this actually gave quite a cool result. Playing around with proportion might be something to explore in the future. I then coloured the picture. I decided to colour it with mixed media. I used a light watercolour wash for the lenses, which are slightly tinted. For the body I used collage. Selecting from magazines that used gloss paper stock. The pieces cut to fill the space. To convert the glossy pages to the frosted quality I has a moment of inspiration when a roll of scotch tape fell out of my bag! I layered strips on top of the collage to if it the frosted and silky texture I was looking for.
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