Observational Drawing

Today we carried on with the module which we started last Tuesday which is OUIL404 visual language for which we were asked to bring in a plant and drawing materials. The first activity we did was to go outside the room to where there was a few images on the walls. We had to pick one, go back to the studio and draw it from memory. This was so much harder than expected as I remembered so little of what was on the image, it took me three goes to get anything I was happy with. Below are my memory drawings in order from first to last. The first one is actually not awful considering the circumstances, his face is just a hilarious shape. The last one I was pretty pleased with just because I liked the style it ended up fitting into, however, seeing the real photo after the exercise made me realise how few vital features I'd managed to recall.




We also then got given the image we were trying to remember and got a chance to draw it from reference, this made me feel really enthusiastic as it was nice to be able to see what I was trying to work from. However, it did make me think that drawing is a lot less stressful when no one knows what your drawing is supposed to be based on or look like.



The second activity was that we had to draw the plants we had brought in and try and experiment with different mark making and materials to record what we were seeing. This was really fun even though I didn't expect to enjoy it. I used only quink but messed around with a variety of different tools like thick and thin brushes and then a chunky square brush. By the end of the session, I felt much more confident in my skills and was actually excited about what was being produced. The last one is my favourite. 

This session was designed to get us thinking about drawing from different sources and it definitely did, although its something that's quite out of my comfort zone, I can really see the value of it. I think that drawing from reference is good as it gives you an image that might not be immediately or at all available to you otherwise. It really helps to broaden your spectrum of ideas and I know theres hundreds of pieces I'd have struggled to draw if not from reference. It also can help you to see the ways in which most people tend to see things, which in turn will help people translate the things you've drawn into something they can understand and identify with. However, I think that drawing from reference can also really inhibit you as its far too easy to just copy from something you're looking at rather than taking clues from it and subsequently making it your own work. You can become too fixated on making your drawing look as hyper-realistic as the image your referencing is which is completely fruitless as what your copying from already exists so therefore doesn't need to be reproduced. I also think it can be really tempting to just always copy from pictures which them means nothing your producing is your original opinion on how you see the world, which is far more interesting than how google images sees the world. 

Drawing from life in my opinion is the best way to make everything you make completely unique as no one in the world is ever going to view the same thing you are in exactly the same way which is such an exciting thought. It does mean nothing is guaranteed to go right the first time round, which is something I'm really struggling to come to terms with, but at the same time I realise the unpredictability of it is what makes it so special. The mistakes I have made over the last few drawing sessions have been the turning point of me looking at what I'm producing and saying "what can I do better?" and "what will happen if I change this?", which in turn has actually made me produce better work. I'm starting to see that drawing from life's main selling point is that how much you bother to look at the world directly influences how you see the world and also how you can then translate the world onto paper for other people to look at. 

Translation is still definitely something I need to work on, but I imagine its a skill that only comes with practise. At the moment, its like I can have a clear idea in mind of what I want an image to look like, but getting my hands to translate this onto the paper is hard. There are certain techniques that others in the studio apply that look amazing and seem to capture the subject better than ways I've tried, but I need to work on the connection between my brain and my hands that allows me to utilise these skills. I also need to look at ways to record something on paper that is simple enough so that it doesn't look like I'm trying to make it photo-realistic, but detailed enough so that people still know what it is. These two below I thought were perfect examples of that thing which I aim to achieve, but don't quite know how to yet. The first on has such nice soft colours for the leaves and then contrasts the harsh lines of the top. Its so simplistic but really communicates the idea of the plant and all its features well. The second on is so minimalistic and graphic, all they seem to have done is put really cleverly placed lines down and it looks like a finished piece. No unnecessary time has been spend faffing around putting leaves in the background because its all implied.