Week Twelve

These quick warm-up sketches show posture and pose. The balance and weight of each that I have captured show that the figure is correctly standing up and not about to fall over. There is also gesture on each, although not very clear as there was not much time to portray it, this is what brings life to the sketches, for example on the bottom one the spine is slightly curved and the head is tilted back a bit.

This 15 minute sketch also displays posture and pose. The model looks sturdy and properly balanced with the weight being placed throughout the left side of the body. Although to improve the posture, the right leg could have been drawn in a more straight line. The gesture throughout this sketch is demonstrated particularly well with the head being slightly bent down onto the hand and if you follow the inner curve of the drawing you can clearly see what the gesture is. This drawing was done with a 2B pencil.

This sketch shows good proportion and weight. The weight can be seen with the arch of the back leading into the taught bottom and also the hands either side of the body. I have shown the muscles well running through the legs, although the muscles in the arm are not quite correct. All together you can see the gesture in this sketch, starting at the head and flowing down the torso and splitting up at each leg. I like the overall composition, and think it is interesting to look at as there are different things going on. I like the pointed toe and how the body isn't directly on the centre of the mat, but on one corner. I like how you can start to see a bit of shading going on, as it makes the picture look more 3 dimensional, seeing where the light and dark areas are on the torso.

Week Eleven

For this sketch I was concentrating on capturing the weight within the pose. The model is leaning onto the table putting all of his weight onto his arms and his right leg. I have shown this by drawing the arms close into the body and straight with slightly raised shoulders. Also by straightening the right leg and bending the left. The head is tilted down and the figure is very streamline showing the tension going through the body as the weight is being placed on only some of it.

In this sketch I tried to represent the tension going through the body, and what the muscles would be doing. The model was slightly leaning forward and with his stomach pushed out and his arms and hands pointing back away from his bottom. I have shown the tension by using angular lines to form the arms and having them look like they are pushing the body out. As the legs are leaning forward you can see the muscles relaxing and on the arms you can see them contracting as they are bending.

This is a 13 minute sketch of the lower part of the leg highlighting where the muscles are. I have used shading to show where the harder and softer parts of the muscles are. You can also see where the harder bits are on the feet, for example, the ball of the foot and it's heel. I have shown how the lower part of the leg has a bigger muscle than the bit around the knee. You can see that the knee is rounded and the leg is slightly bent. The proportions and the angle of the foot are correct although I would have liked to redo the toes, as I struggled over them. The model was fairly slim highlighting his bones more, the curved line near the foot shows the marking of the bone.

Week Ten

This week we were trying to capture movement. Here are several 30 second sketches showing different positions with movement. In a lot of them you can see the rapidness of the movements that were being created and I feel that having some of them overlapping emphasises the movement that was going on. Even though a lot of the lines are wrongly places, you can still see the majority of the positions in which the model made.

This was a 20 minute sketch of the male model sitting down resting his head and his upper weight on his arm. I really struggled with placing the lines especially connecting his head to his body. I feel that the lower half of the sketch went well and you can see the weight that is being placed through his body, starting at the hand and flowing down to the knee and then the feet. The proportion of the overall body is almost correct, although the actual limbs are not.

This was a more successful sketch than the last and shows the model bending down resting on his toes and his hands. I like the movement that I got through this sketch, the way his back is slightly arched leading through to the scrunched up leg and then really being able to notice the pressure and weight put onto the toes. I feel that the placement of the head worked a lot better in this one and you can see that he was looking down at the floor. Adding the shadow to the picture created a nice contrast as there was no shading on the body and helps to create a good composition. This picture took me 10 minutes and I used a 2B pencil.

Week Nine

This was our first life drawing lesson. We looked at movement in the anatomy and basic human form. We started off by doing quick one minute sketches:

These are my first life drawing sketches. The top left and bottom right do not have the correct proportions or shapes and did not go according to plan. The top right has good movement flowing through the head and arch of the back, but the rest of the sketch is rushed. The bottom left is the most successful as you can clearly see what position the model was stood in, even how far her head was tilt back and captures good movement.

These are my skeletal drawings. I used rough lines to mark where the bones were (the arms, legs and spine) and then used the lines to help me to get a more accurate body form. I feel as though the skeletal drawings improved my positioning of lines and helped me to get good movement throughout each sketch.

This is my final drawing of the session. I tried to get my lines to flow more instead of having 'scratchy' little lines. I measured the proportions of the body and did my best to put them onto paper. I feel that this drawing went well as it has a nice composition. If I had more time I would have liked to add some shading to make it more 3 dimensional. I had a lot of difficulty with getting the stretched out leg correct. I had to keep redoing the length of it, and although it is not perfect I think that it works still. I really like the flow of the cloth and the face and hair. This picture took me 15 minutes and I used a 2B pencil.

Week Eight

This week we were focussing on reflective surfaces, the way light hits and travels through an object, making the object look different than it's usual state. I focussed on looking at the specular reflections and the diffused reflections. We started off with quick 5 minute sketches, making sure that there were no kissing objects, and no item was isolated.

First 5 minute sketch:

Second 5 minute sketch:

After my first sketch I realised I had drawn too big as not everything would fit on the page, so for my second I reduced the size. I don't feel that either of these sketches went well, although the objects are in the right proportions to each other, with some accurate lines. I need to stop including detail in my plans, until I have all the objects down and in the right position.

This was my final piece. I have shown refractions in the glass jars and ball, and reflections in the copper objects. The refractions have made the water in the jars change direction to what would normally be seen. For the reflections I used different gradients of grey to show where the reflections of other objects are and also where the light bounces off them. I have left no object orphaned, as all the objects are either 'attached' to another or the big table cloth. There are also no kissing objects. I spent 10 minutes on the composition and 30 on finishing off. I used a 3B pencil for this drawing.

Week Seven

 This week was all about texture. My first sketch is of an apple and orange. I chose to drew them one behind the other to give it a good composition. I gave the orange a darker skin tone than the apple, and shaded it in a different pencil movement to create contrast. On the orange I also added dimples to show the texture. On the apple I added in darker patches to show the impurities of the object. I made the apple look more smoother than the orange as it would be in reality. This drawing took 27 minutes and I used a 3B pencil.

This sketch is of a wicker basket with a metal can on top. I used harder straighter lines to create the can combined with straight solid cross hatching for the reflections to give a more metallic feel than the basket. On the basket I used a mixture of hard and soft lines, the harder lines were to represent the thicker bits of wicker. I also used cross hatching to show the very small and thin wicker material that makes up the basket. I feel that this picture shows good composition and is interesting to look at. This sketch took 33 minutes and was drawn with a 2B pencil.

This sketch is of a hand holding a bar of wood. I showed the texture on the wood by adding in the little details of the grains and using harder lines and deeper shading in contrast to the skin on the hand where I used very soft shading to represent the delicate nature of skin and also added in a few skin fold lines to add to the texture. I feel that I could have added more to the hand to contrast it even more with the wood. This sketch took 26 minutes and was drawn with a 2B pencil.

Week Six

This week was all about still life. Our main focus was an arrangement of flowers sat on a table with two directional lights shining onto it. We started off with two 1 minute sketches which then progressed onto a longer 3 minute one:

The main purpose of doing these quick sketches was to try and speed up our drawings. They were plans before the final sketch. I feel that I still need to improve on this method, I tend to rush my sketches and not concentrate enough on proportions or the placement of objects. After the 3 minute sketch we did a 5 minute one which we then used as the plan for the main drawing:

I already had a 5 minute plan down, so I corrected the plan and went over it to make it look how I wanted it to, then I could move onto adding details and shading to create a 3 dimensional drawing. I am very pleased with how this turned out, I feel that I have really improved on my shading, I have managed to make the vase look round and the table cloth look folded. If I did this again, I would have worked more on the flowers, defining the petals and the stems more. I added in a background in the last few minutes of this sketch to make the object belong, not just floating in white space. I don't feel as if I got the table top right, it's not the right shape because I was at a difficult angle and couldn't master it. I concentrated a lot on how light hits a surface this week, and tried to get the feel of light bouncing into my picture, especially on the vase and table.

Week Five

This week I went out into the city of Bradford and did sketches of landscapes. I focussed on different perspectives, compositions and shading, as I wanted to bring all the skills I had learnt during the previous weeks together. These are a selection of my best sketches:

This picture is of a factory on the street, I like this because it looks as if the street goes on towards my horizon line towards it's vanishing point. I feel this helps it to have a good composition, as well as how the tallest part of the picture is towards the right hand side rather than being situated in the middle. The quality of the lines could have been improved if I spent more time over them. I used a 2B pencil for this sketch and it took me 15 minutes to complete.

This sketch is of a church drawn from a distance with a garden in the foreground. The composition for this picture went well as the eye follows the wall down the road then stops at the main feature, instead of the eye just concentrating on the church. I feel this effectively uses the rule of thirds. For the bushes behind the fence I used a simple swirl effect to give the impression of the leaves, without actually having to individually draw each leaf.

This picture was drawn at Whitby. This day was really bright and sunny, creating massive shadows from all the gravestones. This uses 2 point perspective and the vanishing points can clearly be identified. Overall, I like this drawing because I have combined lots of different new techniques and created something that has good composition and has different shades to it, representing the light and dark areas. I used a 2B pencil for this drawing and it took me around 40 minutes to complete.

Week Four

In this lesson we were focussing on shading. We had a couple of tables set up in the middle of the room with a cloth covering them, onto this shone 3 different light sources: two lamps and the sun. I needed to look out for different types of shadowing being created, normal shadows, where areas receive little light (or no light at all) and cast shadows, where a different object or even the same object is blocking the light (object shadowing and self shadowing).

This is the first quick sketch I drew. I spent about 3 minutes getting the shape right, then the rest of the time I spent shading. I concentrated most on the darkest places, which I shaded quite hardly, then I tried to achieve a balance by adding in lighter places. I don't think I did this very well, though if I had spent more time on it I wouldn't have rushed it and would have achieved a better outcome. From doing this sketch I learnt that I need to practice drawing more quickly with accuracy.

My personal feedback from the previous sketch was to focus more on cross-hatching. I tried to do this, but didn't achieve the look I was going for. My cross-hatching effect turned more into scribbles than an effective shading technique. The only part of this sketch I like is at the top right, this is because I think the progressive tonal difference of the hatches work effectively, showing that the darkest shadows were at the top and it gradually got lighter. As I had never done cross-hatching before I don't think my attempt was too bad, but it has shown me that I need to practice it.

This was my final sketch of the lesson. I spent about 7 minutes getting the shape right then the rest of the time I spent on shading. I feel that this is by far my best attempt at drawing the item. I have managed to get varied tonal differences which have created a 3D look and feel to my sketch. For example, the folds on the right of my image actually look folded. I spent a lot more of my time on the right of the sketch and possibly neglected the left a bit, but I wanted to concentrate on getting a smaller part more detailed so I ran out of time for the left side. I wanted to include part of the shadow on the floor as I really liked the light effect that was seen, I tried to translate this look onto the paper. Overall, I am happy with this 2B pencil sketch even though there is always room for improvement.

Week Three

This week our lesson was focussing on composition, meaning that we learnt how to be aware of the placement of the objects in our drawings. The point of having a good composition is so that when the eye looks at the picture it looks at the whole picture not just the main focus point. Our task was to sketch out different views in separate boxes on our page:

I tried to get each picture to be different to the other. I played around with the compositions and even played around with the angle of the picture (bottom left). In the middle right picture I used the rule of thirds, I achieved this by placing the main focus (the light) onto the top right line intersect, by doing this the eye instantly looks at the whole picture, compared to if the light was right in the middle of the sketch, the eye would have just looked straight at that.

My favourite sketch from this session is the top right. The reason for this is because I like how you get a real sense of looking up at the image from on the ground. I think I have achieved a good composition on this image as when looking at it the eye doesn't go straight of the page when it gets to the right hand side, instead it gets caught on the bottom of the bridge and gets taken back around the picture again in a flowing motion, this creates more interest to my image. 

I feel that my weakest picture this week is the doors at the bottom right, this is because I feel that it lacks good composition, the eye tends to just look at the doors at the bottom and not the rest of the sketch. Although, having the poles at the top right does help to balance the picture out slightly and adds a bit more interest. However, I do like how simplistic it is and feel that this makes it easy on the eye.

Week Two

The second observational drawing lesson was outside in the car park. This lesson was all about perspective, we were trying to bring 3 dimensional objects and draw them onto a flat surface. Our task was to draw the buildings around us.

I started off by drawing what I thought was going to be a 'safe' place, but it turned out to be a really bad decision, as you can see all the buildings were facing the same direction which made it flat and there just wasn't any interesting angles and lines to add to it, so I rapidly stopped and changed my position.

I am much more happier with this drawing. I feel that it has a lot more depth to it than the other. I think I have used the technique foreshortening well as the building looks like it is going back into the distance from the foreground as the lines I drew above and below are going diagonal towards the same point. My picture uses a two-point perspective as when you look at the corner of the building there are two sets of parallel lines moving away, each to their own vanishing point along the horizon line. I really struggled with the windows at the top of the building, as when I first drew them they made the building look tilted, I tried and corrected them but they just didn't go right. My favourite part of this picture is the curved wall coming out of the building, I like this because it gives the overall image a 'complete' feel by adding more shape. I like the shape of the lines that got created by drawing the wall. Overall, I am pleased with the outcome of this 2B pencil drawing.

Week One

Week one was our first drawing session in which we practised drawing lines, circles and spirals which then progressed into shading, the basic skills needed.

Above is my picture of the table and box we had to draw. I drew what I could see, rather than what my brain told me should be there, this is why the box has rounded corners and most of the sides aren't straight. I tried to include the shadow in my picture as well, I think I managed to get the basic shape of it correct, although it is slightly strange. If I had more time I would have shaded in the box to make it more 3-dimensional.