York Observational Drawing

Yesterday for our last visual language session we went to York to do a day of observational drawing like we did right at the beginning of the module. It was really interesting how different an experience yesterday and the first observational drawing day were, I think at the beginning of this first year I absolutely dreaded any kind of observational drawing as I didn't think I'd ever been any good at it and didn't really see the point. I would spend absolutely ages sketching out something I could see really precisely before realising that if I was going to do it any justice and fill it in with shade and tone to suit the hyper-realistic sketch I'd begun, I would be there hours. And even then it probably wouldn't even look that good. However, in yesterdays session I think I realised how much what we've learnt in visual language has shaped the way I now think about first hand drawings, I can now put what we've learnt into practise and therefore come out with much better outcomes which I don't hate looking at. 


These are some of my favourites from the day:

Things I've improved at:

• Selecting appropriate media for a drawing, this one always seemed to me like something I knew how to do, but I think as someone who'd never really done observational drawings before I didn't know the first thing about what I might like to draw with. I came really unprepared to the first session with just pencils and some old graphite, but yesterday I brought charcoal, watercolour, wax crayon and some felt tips. I think its been a case of trial and error to see which ones I like, and also which media aren't really as time effective for doing larger scale observations, such as pencils.
• scaling what I'm seeing down to fit onto the page, and also selecting and cropping a certain part of what I'm seeing to make for a more interesting and well composed picture. After the workshops on depth, framing, overlapping and composition we had I started to properly think about what my eyes were drawn to so therefore what I might enjoy drawing, and I've found that giving this more consideration has helped make my pictures look more balanced and more interesting in general
• translating what I'm seeing and putting it into my owns words, where I used to think the only way to draw something was to copy it exactly I now know that things are much more interesting when you can see a little bit of the hand of the maker in them. I now have a slightly more sketchy vibe going on that I used to reject thinking it looked childish, but now I can see that I'm showing things the way I'm seeing them and that doesn't mean they have to be perfect, its more about capturing the feel of something
• just generally having the confidence to try things multiple times and not give up halfway through is something I've gained in this module. At first I was really intimidated by the amazing talent I was seeing around me, I'd never seen so many people who were good at first hand drawing before so in my head everything I did was inferior (and to be honest, I'd be lying if I said I didn't still feel like this sometimes). But now I can see that everyones different, whilst observational drawing might not be my strongest point and I think theres always room for improvement and I'm still finding myself in this area, I can draw enough to enjoy it and to gain some valuable visual understanding from it and thats a massive improvement for me

Things I could improve on more:

• Although my confidence has improved from last year I do still need to learn to look at my own work and what can be improved there rather than comparing myself to others
• I could be a little less precious about having a nice outcome in an image, and just learn to let go and make mistakes. I think the perfectionist in me knows that if I try something really wild and exciting for the first time whilst sketching then I could risk having a sketch in my book that looks bad or isn't how I want it to be, so in the past I've always stuck to drawing how I'm used to drawing and playing it safe. However from this module I now know that doing this won't help me develop, and although I've pushed myself a lot, I could still push myself more and make more mistakes
• on a similar subject I could do with spending less time on each drawing, I think the careful way I make observational images has limited me and means that I spend too much time on silly details, where if I was a bit bolder the whole process would generally be a bit quicker