My journey through the drawing course at the Open College of the Arts

This project consists of three parts:

1. Using hatching to create tone
2. Using markers or dip pen
3. Drawing using oil pastel

I worked on this project for almost three weeks and produced quite a few drawings and around 22 pages of text from my reflections, including the research point on Ben Nicholson and the Check and Log section. I’m beginning to ask myself whether so much writing is still reasonable… I’m unsure. On the one hand, I like writing and I like noting down my thoughts on what I have done. I also think that the writing process helps to become aware of many aspects in the learning process which would otherwise go unnoticed. But on the other hand, who will ever read all this? For me, this blog is like a diary of my coursework, and I tend not to go back and re-read. I do enjoy looking at the succession of drawings I’ve done for the course, so I really like the sketchbook section of this blog and regularly get back to it with a sense of achievement.

I really don’t know. For the time being, I will simply continue. But I wonder whether it wouldn’t be more effective if I focused on drawing, rather than spending so much time noting down my thoughts.

 

Using hatching to create tone

___ Flat peaches, banana and garlic

For the first drawing, I selected a flat peach. This is a strange fruit, seems to be a novel breeding, because I’ve seen these flat peaches for the first time this year. I only knew round peaches. Besides from being flat, they resemble “normal” peaches by their skin, colour and taste, this gave me some confidence.

I drew a single peach into my A3 sketchbook. The page was too large for the object, this is my problem following the instructions… I briefly considered using a different, smaller sketchbook but decided against it, because the A3 sketchbook is a sort of companion to my coursework and I would like to be able to see the progression, rather than distributing work to several sketchbooks in parallel. This is a decision for now, I might change my mind later.

I chose Wax pastels for this drawing because I liked the brilliant and intense colours. They also permit to build up different colours through layering, similar to oil pastels.

I enjoyed this drawing. Enlarging the object gave me some more space to work out the colours. I feel I made some progress in the way I built up the colours, maybe simply because I gave myself more time to get the tones right, experimenting with multiple layers of different colour values until it felt right.

With respect to detail, I think the drawing is too gross, but this has to do with the medium, it isn’t appropriate for fine detail. It would also be nice to use water with the wax pastels, because I learnt in my experiments how intense the colours become when dissolved with a bit of water. But the sketchbook paper isn’t heavy enough, I’ll do that separately. It might be a nice idea for part two of the exercise, the fruit and vegetables arrangement.

We were also instructed to write down notes on tonal values and ideas for composition next to our drawing. I found this difficult, probably because at such an early stage of the exercise, there’s not much material upon which to reflect. I thought it might become better at later stages, when I’ve drawn more objects, that I’ll be able to develop ideas about which to select and how to arrange them.

The second drawing was done with colour pencils. I drew my objects one after the other. First I selected the banana, then decided to do another flat peach, and finally I chose the garlic. The objects are simply on the same page, but they were not arranged as a group, because the drawing is the result of a “one after the other” approach. I’m quite satisfied with the drawings, I feel that I’ve given myself more time for the task and it was a much more joyful experience than earlier attempts at observational drawings. I perceive this as a personally huge step forward… if feels as if I was better attuned to this type of drawing approach now, compared to earlier attempts.

I’d like to improve on fine detail. Building up colour values with pencils worked really well, the medium permits fine gradations. I found it less appropriate for drawing the irregular patches of the surfaces, for example the brown spots on the banana or the irregular reddish dots and lines on the flat peach. Again I thought a water-based medium might work nicely for these elements.

I still didn’t have many compositional ideas, so I think I will stick to this task and draw some more singular objects until hopefully inspiration for a composition emerges.

___ Aubergine studies

Today, I chose aubergines for some more studies and did a first drawing with oil pastels and a second with coloured pencils.

I don’t know whether I was distracted but somehow I did not get it right. The oil pastels were too gross to draw the plant details properly and I also did not succeed in drawing the surface reflections.

The next try with coloured pencil was better for the details, although I found that I did not take enough time to draw them nicely. But the coloured pencils weren’t very good for capturing the deep black-violet tone of the violet. Dark tones will be medium grey at most, unless one puts much pressure to really et a black area. But somehow I feel that this is not nice with coloured pencils. I’d rather make only small really dark areas, to avoid creating “black holes” in an otherwise rather softly coloured drawing.

I thought it might be a better idea to use marker pens or felt pens or another medium which creates deep black tones more easily.

___ Two compositional studies

So far, I had not yet compositional ideas developing from my single item studies, therefore I decided to approach the task differently. I just chose some vegetables from the fridge and arranged them in a blue bowl. The bowl is actually a plate with a high rim, made of clay with a blueish glaze on it. I chose this one rather than another with a lower rim which has the reddish brown tone of clay because I liked the contrast between vegetable colours and the deep blue of the glaze.

I tried several arrangements of the vegetables in the bowl. I had selected aubergine, green pepper, yellow pepper, some tomatoes, garlic, and some mushrooms. When I had found an arrangement that pleased me, I drew the first very simple and fast sketch just to look how the composition would look like on paper.

I found it a bit cluttered and set out to change the arrangement, but then when I stood, realized that from a higher viewpoint the objects appeared much less cluttered. Therefore I made a second drawing from this viewpoint. It was again done in coloured pencil, like the first compositional sketch. This time I began with a pencil sketch and while I was drawing, I became massively aware of the negative space.

I am not sure whether my attention had been caught so intensely before by the negative space. It should have been because the topic came up several times in instructions. But this time, I really saw it and was able to focus on its shape, while before I was almost exclusively focusing on the objects’ shapes. So this was a nice drawing experience, and I think rather valuable. I hope that it might be easier from now on to take the negative space into account. It might have been promoted by the strong directional light I had used, following instructions. I think this created the intense contrasts which made the forms stand out much lighter than their respective background, and suddenly I was able to see “the holes created by the objects in space”.

I tried to work out the darker and lighter tones of the composition and finally added a layer of colour to make objects more distinguishable. Again I find the colour pencils not intense enough in their colouring. But I’m not quite sure whether it’s not simply a problem of technique because I was satisfired with colour intensity of the fruits I drew yesterday.

Regarding the composition, while I do like this particular drawing, I don’t think this is my favourite composition, because the high viewpoint creates a somewhat artificial situation. The effect comes out when such a drawing is hung on a wall. If it is a naturalistic drawing, then it will look as if the objects were attached to the wall, rather than having been placed on a flat surface. I find this very irritating, it’s as if the objects might fall off the wall at any moment.

Therefore I think I will try out some different arrangements. I thought about going back to a perspective from the side, taking some of the vegetables out of the bowl and placing them to the sides, to avoid clutter inside the bowl.

___ More compositional studies

I wanted to try out different views on my idea for a composition, some vegetables in a bowl. I wanted to do them in small, with several of them on a single page, to facilitate comparison and also to oblige me to leave out detail and concentrate simply on the arrangement. In order to do this, I divided a sketchbook page into 4 areas and wanted to draw a different compositional sketch in each of them.

I started with the first sketch at the lower right of the page, with a detail of the bowl’s rim plus only sections of some of the vegetables actually in the bowl. I was inspired by the idea of a viewfinder, which also just cuts off objects at its boundaries. In a similar way, I drew the objects in a size which would be too large for the quarter of the A3 paper sheet, and cut off my objects.

I began with a pencil sketch and then decided to use oil pastels and try to build up the colour values with them. I was especially interested in the different shades, like light to dark yellow of the pepper and the light to dark areas of the tomatoes. I found it quite difficult to achieve with oil pastels because I wasn’t really able to control the resulting colour once I began to “close” the paper by applying a thick final layer. I used a 24 colour selection, I think this is was study quality, and was quite astonished that there was no warm yellow available, only lemon yellow. This did not match at all the yellow of the pepper and I tried to build up the right tone by using soft layers of orange upon the lemon yellow, and getting the darker areas by using ocre. It was difficult also to do this on the tiny space. Oil pastel is really better adapted to larger sizes.

The second compositional sketch was about the idea of placing objects next to the bowl. I drew it in the top right quarter of the page. Again I started with a pencil sketch and then tried to build up colour. What interested me here were the two green tones of the zucchini and the green pepper, especially the darkening of the zucchini behind the green pepper. Again the same difficulty of not having much space to build up shades of lighter and darker areas of green to create three-dimensionality of shapes. I drew this composition with a different set of oil pastels, also 24 but from JM Paillard. The box contains a warm yellow. I wonder whether in the future I might simply mix my oil pastel sets, this would result in quite a choice of tones, I guess.

The third compositional sketch was inspired by the colour contrast of yellow pepper, red tomatoes and blue bowl, and I also wanted to try out how a portrait format would look like with an object that naturally seemed to invite a landscape format. So I erased the separating lines on the left half of the sheet and made a larger drawing. Again I began with a pencil drawing, and after I had sketched the outlines, I decided to not colourize it but make a tonal study in pencil instead.

I especially like the areas of dark contrasts against light areas, and the areas where an object changes being darker than the background to being lighter than the background (and vice versa). This happens for example in the lower middle of the sketch, on the heads of the aubergine and the zucchini.

I’m quite satisfied with this sketchbook page, because it’s very dense, compared to earlier drawings where there were tiny objects in the middle of an empty page. While drawing these sketches, I also realized that I was much more aware of negative space than in earlier drawings. It feels like I’ve made quite a step forward and I’m glad that I did not give up when I was so frustrated about observational drawing.

___ A drawing of vegetables with felt pen

I proceeded to part two of this exercise, drawing an arrangement. It took me endless until I was satisfied with the arrangement. While I liked the idea of drawing the vegetables and the blue bowl, I was afraid to get bored when drawing them again after the many studies I already did. Then at the beginning, none of the arrangements I tried out did worked for me.

Firstly didn’t like the light at all. My study has a balcony and the windows are somewhat inwardly positioned, this filters a lot of light and the room tends to be a bit dark even during daytime. This was not the ‘strong directional light’ we were encouraged to use. I tried several lamps to improve the situation, but then the arrangement’s colours became artificial and I did not like at all the strong reflections from lamp light which resulted in the fruits getting a ‘plastic’ appeal. I tried whether it would be better to go on the balcony – and yes, the colours were much more natural, but with the current weather of 30 degrees and my balcony having full afternoon sun, I wouldn’t have managed to stay an hour or two on the balcony.

I went back inside. Without light, the colours of my objects were much too dark – the blue bowl, the almost black aubergine – I didn’t like it. I finally settled on a normal warm light working lamp and positioned it right above the bowl. This created reflections, but they were less disturbing than those at other positions or from other lamps. It was also a matter of placing the vegetables in a way which covered some of the more reflective areas of the bowl, for example. So I tried all kinds of different placements, positionings and light directions and this was really exhausting. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have enough energy to even begin with the drawing, if at all I succeeded in finding a satisfactory arrangement.

For the selected vegetables, at the beginning, they were somehow “dead” as an ensemble, there was no inner connection between them. I looked at them and wanted to find out what I liked about them, and how I could make them ‘talk’ to each other. From the aubergine, I liked the dark colour which was actually not black but a very dark purple, and I wanted to bring that out. I also liked how the body of the aubergine was fitted into the pale green stem, I found this made for a nice silhouette.

I also liked the two green tones in zucchini and green pepper, and I wanted to have these objects side by side, to bring out the differences in object colour and how darker greens were behind a lighter green, and how the green colour varied within a single vegetable to create three-dimensional shapes.

Then I found the yellow pepper attractive for its shape and the different yellow colour values, and I discovered the correspondence between its green stem and the other two green objects. I liked the tomatoes for their intense red, and again the effect of lighter and darker red tones to distinguish the tomatoes from each other. I also found that the pale green stem of the tomatoes corresponded well to the green objects and wanted to place it in a “quiet area”, where object contours did not interfere too much.

I was not sure whether to include the garlic too, because the bowl could already have been filled with the other vegetables, and I wasn’t sure how I could make its pale white colour work with the intense red, yellow and green tones I already had. But there was a correspondence between its rose and violet spots and the aubergine, and the garlic stem had an interesting lengthy shape which was a nice contrast to other forms. So I perceived aubergine and garlic as a pair which went nicely together. There was also a nice correspondence between the aubergines dark violet and the same colour on the rim of the bowl. This somehow brought out the bowls blue very intensely.

After many, many tries I finally arrived at arranging and positioning the vegetables in a way that they were talking to each other, the colours and forms corresponded nicely and I also liked the negative spaces the objects created. Then I thought about the part of the arrangement to include in my drawing.

Initially, before I had decided on the arrangement, I wanted to draw a portrait format with only half of the bowl, and some fruits arranged outside the bowl. This was my previous compositional study, and I really liked it. Just wanted to do it differently and a bit larger, on A3 size. But while I was trying out different arrangements with my fruit, I thought that it wasn’t possible to have everything I liked about my objects in the picture if I drew only half of the bowl. I constantly thought about which view would allow to cut something, but then finally I decided that I’d make the drawing in landscape format and cut only a bit of the lower part of the bowl where it stood on the table because this was the least interesting area of the arrangement.

And then I began drawing… after I had spent the whole afternoon on finding a nice composition. I just couldn’t imagine bringing the vegetables back to the fridge and make a pause until the next day,  after so much work to arrive at that composition. So I drew despite feeling somewhat exhaused. But somehow the final arrangement really pleased me and this must have given me some energy back.

I began the drawing with a pencil sketch. I tried to take care about negative space and corrected some areas to get shapes and proportions as good as I could. I was quite satisfied with the pencil drawing, which was only lines without tones, and was reluctant to “spoil” it by drawing over it with colours.

I chose felt pen for this exercise and selected a white smooth paper which wouldn’t dry out the felt pens so quickly as my rough sketchbook paper would have done. I hesitated about the choice because I hadn’t done any object drawing with felt pens before, only the extensive colour experimentations at the beginning of part II. My earlier studies of fruits and vegetables had all been in colour pencil or oil pastel, and one in wax pastel. So I was a bit afraid of using felt pens for the first time in a drawing rather than trying them out on single objects first.

But I knew that felt pens would give me intense colours and that I was able to build up different tones by hatching, which is what I wanted to do. So I gave it a try.

The beginnings of the drawing very very modest and shy and really looked like nothing. But then I found my way into it and became more confident to layer colours. I built up the aubergines dark violet colour with many different colour layers, from rose, violet, blue, green, red, brown, until it became “almost black”. Especially nice was the aubergines shade to its right bottom, where an even darker colour represented the background. I’ve built up the shadow colours in a similar way, without using black.

Technically I think I need more practice and still a larger paper size would have been better. But for the first try with felt pens, I think the objects’ colours are quite nicely captured and there’s also much three-dimensionality in the shapes. I also like the strong clean colour contrasts of green, yellow and red against the deep blue bowl, while at the same time there’s the correspondence in colours between the blue bowl and its dark violet rim, and the aubergine’s dark violet tone. The white garlic is a bit of an outsider, but at least it corresponds well to the aubergine and the form introduces a nice contrast.

At the end, I included the shade of the bowl on the table to make the right side come out better, and then added the shade on the left side to have the drawing more balanced overall.
With respect to the task, the paper is not so well filled because there’s simply white space around the arrangement. But I’m quite satisfied with everything else.

A strange feeling came up nevertheless, related to felt pen: A feeling that this is not a “true” artist material and that it would have been worthwhile to choose a different drawing material. This is sort of a negative preconception against felt pen. But I think I will do some more drawings with this medium to see how I get along.

Overall, I’m happy with the drawing and feel that it represents another step forward. There’s also some technical skill involved, getting practice at building up colours and not being disheartened by the modest beginnings of a coloured drawing. Rather, continue drawing to bring out what one has seen in the arrangement. I think this is a result of having done an intense analysis and working so hard on the composition before beginning to draw: I knew what I wanted to bring out. This knowledge has not been so present on other occasions when I drew “chance arrangements”.

 

Using markers or dip pens

___ Two sketchbook pages: Composition of fruits (pencil)

I was really confused by the instructions for this exercise, because I did not know whether we were supposed to do real drawings with felt pen and dip pen and ink in our sketchbooks, or whether we were only supposed to do compositional sketches and do the real work outside, choosing appropriate paper for the task. I opted for the latter and drew two sketchbook pages. The first was a very simple composition, just three fruit on a table: A piece of melon and two pears on a dark gray plate. I liked the arrangement because of its nice, warm colours and because of the simple, but somewhat irregular shapes. For the second drawing, I divided the page in three sections – the right half, and then two smaller parts on the left, one quadratic and the other very broad. On this sheet, I tried out variants of cropping the arrangement, as if with a viewfinder. I drew with a 3B pencil and just tried to get shapes and negative space correctly, and I also added some tonal values.

I like the drawings, but I’m not sure whether I didn’t misunderstand the task. It doesn’t make much sense to now repeat the drawings outside the sketchbook, using colour. But I really did not want to draw with felt pen or dip pen and ink inside the sketchbook, because its paper is too thin for these mediums. It is also too “thirsty” for the felt pens and would dry them out too quickly.

So I think I will continue with more studies, next time using felt pen, dip pen and ink, and a combination of both. I will also try out using a rough material like watercolour paper. But I’m not sure what this exercise is aiming to teach us, beyond experimentation with felt pen and dip pen and ink.

___ Quick felt pen composition of fruit

This drawing was done when I did not have much time. I chose felt pen and slightly changed the arrangement of two pears and a piece of melon. I was interested in the orange tones which nicely contrasted to the green at the rim of the melon and on the pears. I also liked the contrast to the grey plate which made the colours bright.

I don’t think this is reflected sufficiently in the drawing. I had only about 45 minutes and I think the drawing is not finished, because the colours are not really worked out as I would have liked to have them, with a depth of colour as in the vegetable drawing. But on the other hand, I like the drawing because it is documenting an intermediate step, where colours are not yet ready. With the vegetables drawing I went through a similar stage. So the drawing is also a reminder to keep on working until colours are really built up.

Of course there’s always the danger of overdoing it by making too many layers, smudging the colour and dissolving the paper. Especially with the thin marker paper I used here.

As a consequence of my dissatisfaction with the paper, I have looked out for more robust support for felt pen drawings and discovered Bristol paper. This is a very heavyweight paper or even card. Finer varieties are available from about 200 g/m2 weight and it has a very smooth surface which does not dry out the felt pen. It is also recommended for dip pen and ink and all types of naturalistic works where surface texture would disturb.

So far I never felt disturbed by surface texture, on the contrary, but having a better and more robust support for felt pen drawings makes me quite happy. The thin paper I had used until now, with a weight of around 70 g/m2 created a very weak overall impression of the drawing, despite the nice colours of the felt pen. I think the thin paper is better for light drawings, for example a pencil sketch lightly coloured with some markers. But it’s not appropriate for felt pen drawings that are really worked out.

___ Still life of fruit in pencil

After slightly changing the arrangement because I had eaten one of the pears in the meantime, I set out to draw a coloured ink study on heavier paper. I began with a pencil sketch because I wanted to be sure that my objects fitted on the paper, and I also wanted to be able to correct size and proportion errors, before beginning with the uncorrigible ink.

When I had a nice sketch of the forms which also indicated some of the lighter and darker areas, I decided to work out the sketch, rather than drawing on top of it with ink. I thought this would be good practice for observing details and building up tonal values, which I had not very well managed in earlier drawings. I’m quite satisfied with the drawing, because the forms are quite accurate and have volume, and I also managed to include some detail of surface textures.

Areas for improvement would be the placement on the paper – my arrangement is too much on the left side, and this was not the result of a deliberate decision. Then contrasts could be a bit more pronounced because when looking from a distance, the drawing appears a bit weak and the forms cannot be distinguished anymore.

The most difficult element for me was the shade of the plate on the table. I worked very long on this part of the drawing and am not really satisfied with the result. My fruit were again placed on a grey plate, and the plate was placed on a white table. The shade was gray and somehow I wasn’t able to tell whether the plate or the shade was darker. With a dark shade, the shade became much too important, and with a light shade, it didn’t look right as well. I think there’s also a problem with my drawing lines to indicate the shape of the shade, both the object shades on the plate and the plate’s shade on the table. There’s an artificial sense to this line. But without the contour lines, I tend to feel lost with hatching the shaded areas because I don’t know where the shade is placed.

The problem with shades appeared in other drawings as well, irrespective of the medium I used. I’m not sure how to proceed. Maybe it would be a good idea to look at other artists’ works how they resolved the problem.

___ Still life of fruit in coloured ink (monochrome)

After drawing the pencil study, I wanted to take up my original idea and make a drawing in coloured ink. Again I drew a light sketch at the beginning to place my objects. Funnily enough it’s only now that I realize that I misplaced the objects again, rather than putting the whole arrangement a bit more to the right side of the paper.

Once I was satisfied with the pencil sketch, I continued with ink to work out some details. Initially I wanted to combine several ink colours but was very unsure about technical aspects. For example, whether it would be ok to use the same nib and change constantly between ink pots in different colours. I was afraid this would spoil the colours if I distributed darker ink pigments into the lighter colours.

I thought about using several dip pens, one for each ink colour, but I did not have enough nibs and did not feel confident enough to draw with different inks and different nibs at the same time. Another idea was to use the coloured inks in layers, as if I was printing, one colour after the other. I found this was the safest approach and therefore finished my light brown first layer. But then I liked the drawing and found it somehow finished, and I did not want to run the risk of spoiling it by adding another layer of colour. So I left it at that, with a monochrome ink drawing, and the intention of thinking more deeply how I might use different coloured inks in a single drawing.

___ Still life of fruit in coloured ink and felt pen on watercolour paper

Again I tried a slightly different arrangement, this time with bananas, nectarines and a pear. I liked the intense colours on the grey plate, and the correspondence of red tones of the nectarines and on one side of the pear.

This time I had taken watercolour paper with a strong surface texture. The drawing was again done in stages, beginning with a pencil sketch, and then I chose indigo for the ink colour to work out the drawing. Despite my objections against using felt pen on rough paper, I wanted to give it a try at least once. I rubbed the pencil sketch away once I had the drawing in indigo ink. This was to avoid smudging with lighter felt pen colours.

I colourized the drawing with yellow, red and green felt pen tones. I also used some darker colours for the shaded areas and also on the gray plate. I think I was less successful with building up colours than in the vegetables drawing. I was very impatient while drawing and did not take the time to capture details how the colour tones changed on the fruit’s surface. This may partly be due to the uncomfortable feeling of drying out my felt pens on this thirsty paper, I just felt like having to hurry up before felt pens were empty, or something like that.

The shade of the banana on the left bottom is unfinished, because my cat Paula had placed herself on the drawing table… So I just indicated the shape of the shade from memory. This of course weakens the drawing because one of the interesting aspects of the composition was the correspondence of banana on the plate and stretching out beyond it, and the corresponding dark shade on the plate and the table. But I enjoyed Paula’s presence and did not want to chase her away for a shade!

___ Still life of fruit in A4 format

This was the final drawing for that exercise. It was to supposed to be drawn on A4 cartridge paper. I found the format difficult because all the other drawings were in A3 and even that size was a bit small for drawing details when working with felt pen. The second difficulty was that I don’t really know what cartridge paper is. Since I’m on the course, I have bought many different types of paper but wasn’t aware that cartridge paper was among my selection. Some search on Google did not help in understanding what the most important properties were so that I’d be able to choose a paper which would be somewhat similar. Therefore I decided to select a paper which I found appropriate for what I wanted to do: A drawing with pen and ink, using multiple ink colours. I chose a rather heavy, clean white paper with a smooth surface.

From the earlier composition, I actually liked the last one best and its fruit were not yet eaten, so this arrangement was a natural candidate. I was hesitating whether to draw a pencil sketch first which would help to avoid compositional errors, or whether to use ink right away. I decided to have a go with ink and leave out the pencil sketch, because while it gave me more security, I also felt that the ink drawing had lost an original quality. Rather, I had been using ink to colourize an existing drawing. I wanted to try out a different, more risky approach.

The first try was with very short lines, almost dots. I tried to draw in a way which would allow me to correct errors by not making too strong marks or bold lines before I was sure about the placement of my objects on the paper. That first sketch in dark brown ink looked so miserable that I stopped. I tore it apart and threw it away. I became unsure and thought maybe it would be better to stick to pencil preparatory sketches to avoid this type of experience. I made a pause and was a bit agitated because I did not really know how to proceed.

Then I just jumped in and decided to stop worrying about errors, rather use dip pen and ink in a way I would use a pencil – in a loose and sketchy manner, simply correcting by drawing new lines. This felt much better and actually it worked out quite well. I began the drawing with a compositional sketch and drew the objects as if they were transparent, correcting the shapes when I discovered they were wrong. When I had the proportions approximately correct, I proceeded to work out the shades. I also became confident enough to use different coloured inks, like the brown tone and some blue to indicate the plate. But I had only a very limited ink colour selection and the drawing looked much less appealing than the previous study where I used felt pen.

So I decided to add some yellow, red and green felt pen tones, beginning with yellow and adding darker tones step by step. This worked quite well with the paper because it had a rather smooth surface. Overall, I think this drawing is less successful than the A3 drawing on watercolour paper, but nevertheless it was important for me personally because I made a step forward with the dip pen by overcoming my anxiety to make errors. In this drawing, the corresponding shapes of banana and its shade are better captured than in the A3 drawing, although there is not enough contrast within the dark areas of the drawing. I could have worked out this aspect better. The drawing was done very quickly, maybe because I got a bit bored with doing the same composition twice.

The paper had a weight of around 200 g/m2 but despite this rather robust quality, the ink bleeded through the paper onto the next sheet of the pad. If I had to do this drawing again, I would certainly draw on Bristol paper – heavy enough to prevent bleeding and with a smooth surface that doesn’t dry out felt pens. I’m looking forward to do some pen and ink work on that paper, later on.

___ Some back reflections

I’ve now completed this exercise, or rather, I decided to stop working on it because I feel the due date for the Part II assignment approaching. The agreed submission date is 1st September, that’s a bit less than 4 weeks from now and I’m not sure whether it’s a realistic goal, nor whether it is even good for me to try and hurry.

There’s still another exercise to go, but it’s “only” a single drawing, not a task consisting of several parts. So hopefully this won’t take too long. But actually I don’t like having a clock ticking and telling me to work faster and not explore routes I would like to. For example, I wasn’t satisfied with my final drawing for the last exercise and would have liked to do another one with coloured inks on cartridge paper, but decided against it because of time pressure. Maybe I can get back to that topic later, or do a different task with coloured inks. Or maybe the best would be to just ignore time pressure and do what I like. I will have to reflect on this and find out how I get along best.

Yesterday evening, I photographed all my work for this project and uploaded it into the blog sketchbook. I think that there was one point where I made a huge step forward. This was the second compositional study of vegetables in the sketchbook, where I “discovered” negative space. It was really a very conscious experience. Suddenly I saw the forms around the objects and could switch my attention between objects and background forms.

The second compositional study was already better than the first one due to this discovery, but I think the next drawing, the compositional studies in pencil and oil pastel, represented a real improvement. Somehow the forms appeared much more real, with real volume, rather than “somehow drawn”. Then the final felt pen study reflected this improvement, and I think it also reflected the work I put into exploring felt pen at the beginning of Part II, because I felt quite at ease with building up colours using hatching. It’s not that I found it easy, but I had confidence that I was able to create colour shadings and also had already gained some valuable practice on it.

Two more results of this exercise are that I searched for cartridge paper at my local art supplier and have now A3 and A4 formats available. It is a rather heavy paper of around 200 g/m2, natural white with a rough, but not overly textured surface. I think it can be very well used with pencil, charcoal, pastel including oil pastel. But I wouldn’t use it for watercolour or felt pen. I think it’s not heavy enough for watercolour and too thirsty for felt pen.

I also decided to add to my selection of coloured inks and bought yellow, red and blue, plus a light green. I probably won’t use these colours directly, but I thought I could try out to mix inks to obtain broken colours, rather than buying a large selection of broken tones and no way back to a bright tone when I want to employ one. There will be some experimentation involved. For example, I need a kind of deep pot to dip the pen into, so a palette wouldn’t be very practical for dip pen drawings. It would be fine though when I use a brush and water-diluted mixtures.

 

Drawing using oil pastel

I approached this exercise a bit reluctantly. I had been out shopping to get some fruit and vegetables which would be nice for drawing, but found selecting items difficult as I was already trying to assemble them into a nice composition. Supermarket choice wasn’t that big and had difficulties developing interest. It felt like “again some red, yellow and green pepper?” On the other hand, I was reluctant to select objects I hadn’t drawn before because I knew this would be more difficult than with objects I was already acquainted with.

Also I thought about the medium ‘oil pastel’ which not very appropriate for fine detail. So I looked out to find things with different sizes, shapes and colours, but not complicated surface texture. I bought aubergine, dark plums, and some peppers. Later at home, I selected the aubergine with two plums and yellow and green pepper, placed these on a blue plate and chose a wooden table as a background. I liked the dark red of the aubergines and plums, which corresponded nicely to the colour of the wooden table and made for an intense contrast with the blue plate.

I had already selected a dark reddish brown, rough textured drawing paper and also imagined it would be interesting to develop the deep violet tone of aubergine and plums on this colour.

I started as instructions outlined, with a “neutral” colour to outline shapes. But which colour is neutral on dark brown paper? I decided on a medium gray. Drawing shapes went quite well. But instructions said to then block out the darker areas, and this didn’t work very well. I chose dark blue, and the problem was that due to the strong directional light, I had very sharply delineated shades but was still unsure about my objects’ exact contours. So the dark marks were confusing me instead of making the drawing more clear. Then I sketched in some medium tones and began working up the colours.

It didn’t work very well. I was very dissatisfied with what I was doing. For example, the yellow tones of the pepper were very difficult to build. Normally I would have taken ocre for the shades, but on the dark support this somehow did not work. All brown tones just weren’t visible. I went on to take orange and use a very light yellow tone, but just couldn’t get the tones right. Similar problems with the other objects. Looking at the drawing it felt wrong most of the time and I did not know how to do better. I kept on drawing layer over layer and the paper surface was very quickly saturated, but I wasn’t satisfied with the colours at all.

My feelings towards this drawing are quite ambiguous. I think it is hastily drawn, without love for detail. The colours are somehow artificial, contrasts exaggerated. It feels like I’ve fallen back into old, not-so-good habits, rather than learning something new or applying new skills. On the other hand, I’m quite surprised that despite all the shortcomings, the drawing of the table surface works if looked at from further away, and the blue plate indeed has some three-dimensionality to it, as have the vegetables. The violet tones are not that bad.

I’m thinking how I might improve this drawing. I thought about taking out single objects and drawing them enlarged, in order to practice building up colour with oil pastels. I might also draw the whole arrangement again in A2 format, rather than A3, to have more space available. But selecting single objects might help me to focus on a smaller task, which should make it easier.

So overall, I had many difficulties with this drawing, mostly related to my lack of practice with oil pastels. Another problem was that I was quite exhausted yesterday, so this might explain why I did not have enough concentration to really look and draw what I see. I’m not sure, but maybe it would be good to have another go with oil pastels until I see some improvement, before proceeding to the next project. Having a due date for an assignment is somewhat problematic because learning and progress cannot be scheduled.

On the other hand, I thought that if I manage to work on the course each day for 1 or 2 hours, then I might be able to meet the due date without feeling pressurized. But there are still two more projects plus the assigment, and normally I would calculate 2 weeks for the assignment, which would leave me only one week to complete two projects and this is not a realistic goal. It might work with one week per project plus one week for the assignment though. So I’ll try to work regularly and see how far I get, maybe I need one or two weeks more but that should suffice.

___ Oil pastel drawing, second try

I’ve given it another try with the pepper and aubergine composition yesterday. I chose a slightly different coloured paper, a medium light brown instead of the dark reddish brown tone. I also used the easel rather than having the drawing board on my knees. I drew for 2 hours in the evening, until I was really exhausted. The drawing is not yet finished, but I’m planning to continue this drawing before the aubergine will make its way into delicious Moussaka.

Some things are better in this drawing than in the first. For example, I made the outline sketch in a dark brown tone and found drawing the shapes somewhat easier than before. Maybe this was due to greater familiarity with the arrangement, but it may also have been because I was drawing in a tone darker than the paper, whereas in the first painting, I used a medium grey which was like a lighter tone on dark paper. So the dark marks this time helped me to indicate the darker areas in a natural way.

Then I sketched in the lighter areas with a lighter colour, which also was quite natural. I think the colours of the peppers are less artificial this time, and the contrasts are less exaggerated. But I still had enormous difficulties with the dark violet of the aubergine and plum. There’s one plum less in this drawing because I ate one. Maybe I’m focusing too much on details, and too early. Maybe it would be better to just draw the object in their own colour and only then add light and dark areas, rather than trying to build up the colour from light and dark areas of the overall composition. I’m not sure about this and need more practice.

I built up the colours of my objects and the plate, but am not finished with the table which represents the background of my drawing. I began sketching it, but was too tired to finish the drawing. I would like to leave it in a sort of unfinished, sketchy state, but it still needs some work on the table surface. I discovered a nice effect of using the paper colour as a medium tone and hope I can explore this further. In the current state of the picture, my sketchy lines create a texture with holes, rather than a cane plaited surface

___ Finishing the second oil pastel drawing

On the next evening, I continued with the second oil pastel drawing of vegetables. It’s “finished” now, although I’m less than satisfied. I like the objects on the plate, but I don’t like how I drew the wooden table. I was trying to improve that part of the drawing yesterday evening, but maybe I was again too exhausted after a work day, or maybe there was just something wrong with my approach. I didn’t enjoy what I was doing and I did not like the result. The negative feelings were somewhat moderated when I looked at the drawing again this morning. This corresponds to my typical experience of being extremely critical with everything I do when I reflect on it right afterwards. It’s only later that I become more accepting and begin to see the successful aspects, too.

But for the problems of this drawing, I think I wasn’t successful in capturing the specific texture of the table surface. Somehow, no matter how much I tried, it just didn’t improve. It felt like I was doing things the wrong way, but not knowing how to do better and therefore trying harder in the same wrong way, leading basically to nowhere. I stopped drawing before the paper was saturated.

So for the future I know that I need some more experimentation and practice with oil pastel as a drawing medium. I also need more practice with capturing surface textures. I was looking at the table and simply not able to translate what I saw into what I drew on the paper sheet. Maybe oil pastel is not the appropriate medium for drawing this type of surface structure, or at least my approach wasn’t working. It was a quite frustrating experience overall. But I’ll take it by thinking about what OCA tutor Jane Lazenby said in the video “Drawing 3-dimensional objects” – if it doesn’t work out, one shouldn’t worry too much, after all it’s only a piece of paper.

There’s just one more thing I would like to reflect about, and this is why I felt so uncomfortable while working on this drawing. It may have been because I knew I was doing things the wrong way and continued in the same manner, rather than stopping, reflecting, and taking a different approach. I think that I was somehow repeating myself, rather than taking a risk and trying out something new. Maybe this was related to my feeling of exhaustion. Maybe I should have employed a different medium for the table background – although this was not the task we were supposed to do. My experience from this exercise supports my opinion that oil pastels are not so good for depicting detailed structures in a realistic way.

What I find strange is that if oil pastels are medium which encourages a bold approach to texture, why did I feel so uncomfortable? After all, it has been the bold approach which I preferred over detailed, naturalistic drawings. But I feel that I would have wanted to do a study of the table texture first, to explore and understand how it can be drawn “economically”, and then translate this acquired knowledge to the medium of oil pastels. As it was, I tried drawing the texture without having understood how it functions, and it just didn’t work out.

But I’ll be finishing this project for now and see whether I can tackle these problems in the next projects and exercises. I’ve read another student’s reflections on this project and she found the most challenging part of this project was the need to constantly employ different drawing mediums, without the time to explore them more fully. I hadn’t been conscious of this, but I feel it’s very true for me, too. I felt comfortable with felt pen, but like a complete beginner with oil pastel, without the time to explore the medium. But then again, there’s also an opportunity in realizing lack of skill. I might tackle this in the future.

 

Reference

Another OCA student’s blog page on this project:
http://sueoca.blogspot.de/2011/02/drawing-using-oil-pastels.html