Visual Language: Drawing from life

During this session we went out into the city and drew things from life, which is not something I'm at all used to doing. Although I know its something that quite important to practice, usually I rarely draw anything from life unless its reference for something specific. We went into the park first with lots of drawing materials and starting sketching, we had to focus on certain points of view such as from above or from below. Some of the materials I used were charcoal, fine liner, pencil and thick black pen, my favourite of which was the thick black pen as I think it looks really graphic and dramatic. The hardest to work with in my opinion was the charcoal as although it looked great, it smudged which made the sketches look a lot worse.

Things I thought were successful in this activity:
- Sketching the building at the university campus: I discovered I really enjoy sketching the ins and outs of buildings although its sometimes difficult to get the proportions down right first time.
- Using simple lines: Instead of trying to get a lot of detail down in one sitting, during this activity I specifically focused on trying to only record quick drawings and convey the idea of an object, not the whole thing. This looks really affective.
- Focusing on obscure angles: This made the sketches so much more interesting rather than just having a whole scene of a park that includes lots of scenery and people, I focused on smaller parts of my surroundings and because of this was able to give the pieces much more detail.

Things I thought I need to work on from this activity:
- Sketching people is HARD: Seriously I really struggle with drawing people, so usually I avoid it or just spend ages perfecting the drawings. But with the quick sketching tasks we were being set it meant we had a smaller amount of time to capture people in. Its really hard to get a likeness using only a few lines. This is something I need to work on and stop putting off, PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.
- Its OK to make mistakes: I know this sounds really cheesy but it definitely is true, at art A level, we were told that the pieces of work in our sketchbooks would be graded better if they were more complete and basically all looked like final pieces. I'm still trying to train myself not to think like that anymore, and even through a few hours of practice and development, you can see the difference in my work.