Sunday 23 September 2012
I have drawn the fish this afternoon. I chose a fresh gilthead fish. I had bought it yesterday already, but in the evening I was too tired for drawing, but today I took the time and drew, and now the fish is in the oven. I did not want to wait any longer with cooking so another try might be from the photo I took, or with another fish!
For the Bockingford paper, this is not very known in Germany and I think I confounded it with Bockingford Inkjet paper which has a very smooth surface and is very good for drawing with markers or pen and ink. But probably instructions referred to watercolour paper with some roughness in texture.
I chose watersoluble colour pencils and this worked quite well on the paper I had chosen because it was heavy enough to not dissolve or buckle when I worked over the drawing with water.
Composition.
The main problem was that I had to close myself off in the kitchen because my four cats would otherwise not have permitted me to finish the drawing, they’d have eaten the fish. So I took a lamp, drawing board and drawing utensils with me and improvised a “fairly neutral context” for the drawing. On a stool I had put a black table mat, on which I put a gray plate with the fish. So the arrangement wasn’t very colourful, a grey-white fish on a grey plate on a black table mat. But I detected some colours on the fish while drawing, like yellow around the eyes and reddish and blueish tones on its body.
Critical reflection
I think I managed to capture the shapes of my composition quite well, and I like the facial expression of my fish. Despite being dead and waiting to be cooked and eaten, the fish has a very friendly and almost happy expression. I also like how I included very light notions of colour.
But I’m also very critical about the drawing. For example, the background cloth has no “clothness”. It should have been much darker and convey the impression of a textile. Also, the surface of the fish doesn’t look like the real fish, I didn’t capture the shiny texture.
To improve in the future, it would be good to do some detail studies of the cloth and the fish surface before starting a drawing like this. I think I was again overwhelmed by the complexity of the patterns and did not really understand them, and this is possibly the reason why they are not very realistically depicting what I saw.
