Still life painting of fruit

22/10/14 - In this session we were asked to draw and paint a still life of fruit. Materials I used were charcoal, a 2H pencil, normal paper, cartridge paper, acrylic paints and hog hair brushes. in this session I used a combination of the techniques I had looked at in other sessions.Techniques used in this session were, timed sketching, quick charcoal sketching, painting, perspective, positive and negative space and proportion. the formal elements I looked at were shape and form, tone, and colour.

first of all we did a quick charcoal drawing of the fruit, which enabled us to identify different tones. Then we did a painting of the fruit, concentrating on different aspects like colour, shape, form and perspective.

Areas of my work that I think worked well are drawing the fruit to scale and using proportion. areas of my work that I think I need to work on are painting accurately and blending the colours better. To extend my skills I have looked at some other artists still life paintings.

To help extend my skills I looked at some other paintings of fruit to help me identify where some of my strengths and weaknesses are. I particularly liked this painting of a strawberry because it has really good use of tone and colour and looks realistic. The shapes and proportions are also accurate do the strawberry looks very effective.

Drawing with ink

17/09/2014 - In this session we were experimenting with using ink. first, we got into small groups and had to collect two natural forms from outside, such as leaves and conkers etc. we then put these on a plinth in the centre of our group, and arranged them so that each person had a good view of the objects to draw from. We used natural forms such as leaves, pebbles and conkers to draw from. We did exercises again that helped us to look at and think about the properties of the objects, such as drawing in 3 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds and with our opposite hand. I used a fine liner pen to draw outlines of the objects, but without taking the pen off the page, making sure I used one continuous line, creating a 'web' of the objects with lines through it. I then used water to add tonal detail to the drawing, this is my work:

I found drawing the objects quite easy and think the shapes and proportions were accurate, but found it difficult not to take the pen off the paper. I was quite pleased with this work, however, the next task was to draw the same objects, but using a dip pen and ink. This was the first time I had used this technique so I found this really difficult to control, and also struggled with adding tone by cross hatching and I wasn't really pleased with the results. To extend my skills I will practice using cross hatching, and using a dip pen and ink. I will also look at some artists that use ink.

I have looked at some other artists ink drawings, and have found quite a few that I like and think look really good. I can take inspiration and learn from these existing examples to improve my own work. I think that the cross hatching works well on these examples, and cross hatching is something I need to improve.

This image in particular is very similar to the piece of work I created, as it uses both ink drawing, and tone which has been added with water, and the subject of the work is a natural form.

Cross hatching

Charcoal study of keys

10/09/2014 ~ Charcoal study of keys

During this session I studied a set of three keys, and produced a charcoal drawing of them. This is my piece of work.

This was the first time I had used charcoal so it took me a while to get used to using it, and although it kept smudging easily, I eventually got the hang of working with the charcoal and I was quite pleased with my drawing. I liked using charcoal because it allows you to get a range of different tones and to blend them together well. It was also quicker than pencil shading and I liked the style it created. I think I might use charcoal again, but will practice using it more by doing another drawing and experimenting with it so that I can achieve better results before using it more in my work. Something that I learned from this session was to make sure I start shading from the top left hand side and work across, instead of starting on the right because I kept smudging the parts that I had already done, and had to re do them. To improve, I could complete the rest of my drawing, taking more care and time, and also look at other artist's work who use charcoal.

The way we studied the keys, and the exercises we did before hand really helped me to think more about the shapes and features of the keys, which made it easier for me to draw them.

I looked at some artists that use charcoal, to compare my own work with theirs. My drawing that I produced looked very similar to the style of Jim Dine's charcoal drawings of tools, which I quite like the style of. I think that if my drawing was more refined and complete, and had more contrast, then it would look much better.Here are some images of his work.

http://x-hizashi-x.deviantart.com/art/Jim-Dine-Tool-Study-202350239

http://rawdesigns2.wordpress.com/category/jim-dine/

http://www.starr-art.com/exhibits/Dine/

Overall, I was quite impressed with how my charcoal drawing of keys turned out.

Colour wheel

Colour Wheel

16/10/14 - In this session we looked at the colour wheel. Materials I used during this session were Gouache paint, sable paintbrushes and cartridge paper. the formal elements I looked at were colour, tints and shades. Techniques I used during this session were painting and colour mixing. we filled in a colour wheel, starting with the primary colours, red, blue and yellow in the middle, and then mixing the secondary and tertiary colours. Then we looked at complementary colours, complementary colours are colours that are opposite each other in the colour wheel. I learned how to mix different browns by mixing the complementary colours. I then looked at tints and shades. a tint is where white is added to a colour to make it lighter, and a shade is where black is added to a colour to make it darker.

Primary colours are the three colours that make every other colour, and cant be mixed using other colours. Secondary colours are made by mixing two of the primary colours, and tertiary colours are the colours in between.

Areas of my work that I think worked well are my colour mixing accurate colours and painting quite neatly. I found that I had a good understanding of how the colours work and the colour wheel. to extend my skills I used colour mixing in the next session for painting a still life of fruit, this helped me to mix accurate colours for my painting.