For this task, we've been asked to create a series of drawings in response to four photographs of our choice. The photographs must be of the following; Something engineered, manmade or structural, Something natural or organic, A Full figure image of someone doing something and a Portrait of somebody's face. The end product of these studies had to be in A4 format and monochrome, with a minimum of 3 for each photo
I chose to source photos from places I hadn't looked at previously or using sources I would rarely go to - so I went and checked out the international photo journals kicking around in the library. I was interested in subjects either not what i'd typically draw or perhaps maybe had a particularly striking composition
For these I used ink/brush, pencil and willow charcoal - none of which I tend to draw much with. The media that had least control to it ended up giving the best results I felt - the ink and the charcoal were especially gestural. That being said though, the semi-continuous pencil lines also came out with some looser effects than the sketchy, scratchy nature of pencil of which I'm used to. The good thing about the charcoal was that I could mix in a few subtle highlights using some chalk too, but it was also a pain as being left handed I tended to smudge it a hell of a lot. Probably not something for super detailed work but I enjoyed the challenge.
The composition of this photo really struck me a lot but it was something I couldn't quite replicate in my studies. I think a lot of this was due to the fact the original photo was square and end products were A4 - however, I think the second two definitely began to nail it more than the first one did; the first one was far too stylised and I tried to get too much detail into it - the other two were much stronger with all the useless info removed
For an image of such simple buildup it was surprisingly hard to capture as a study - largely because the shapes and lines were so slick and sharp it was difficult to replicate in sketchy media like chalk and white pencil. The last study worked best I felt - simply because the whole outer silhouette of the image was cut out of paper to give it this sharp edge. I think it suffered for the same reasons the fox one did though - square composition + A4 format = not good. Noted for the future.
A lot of the challenge for this one was getting the perspective of the cleaner right. What I found though was however, that the more I repeated the process growing less sketchy as I went, the more and more the perspective improved as well. Reducing the image to just lines with the ink and brush also helped because I was resisting the urge to sketch over things too much
Overall it was a pretty fun exercise! I was nice to work from a reference image for a change because its something i'm not used to doing - more someone who takes quick observations on the go. My main criticism of my work for this brief was that maybe I was a bit too safe with the media that I used, and perhaps I should probably go away and explore more in future tasks. The ink and brush work came out super nice in this so i'll probably aim to do more of that
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