Week 1: How to Draw?

• Image 1: Line + Edges: The first entry in the journal, I hadn’t drawn in a while, and this was more of a warm-up.
• Image 2: Light + Shadow: I was still adjusting to my pencils, I bought the wrong size, working with a disregard for lines made a more organic shape.
• Image 3: Erasure: I enjoyed this one, the end result was very rounded and had interesting contrast, but it was difficult to get rid of such heavy pigmentation.
• Image 4: Perspective: Just about comfortable with my pencils at this point, working on perspective let me make a cleaner drawing.

I ended up incorporating elements of these into my First Resolved Drawing, but mainly focusing on improving on what already existed in Image 4. I had to draw the resolved work with reference of what I had already drawn of it, which was an interesting challenge, I would be interested how this “Chinese Whispers” effect could go, and how accurate the final Resolved work is to the original reference.

Week 2: Perspectives and Landscapes

• Image 1: Top-Left: Another warm-up, focusing on 1 point perspective. We were given an image and traced it in order to understand where the vanishing point was situated. It was interesting to get an actual lesson about perspective
• Image 2: Bottom-Left: We were told to go wild with the Image from the first excercise, using the lightbox to trace over the original trace in different orientations. This excercise was okay, I feel like my result wasn’t very inspired…
• Image 3: Top-Middle: We focused on 2-point perspective to understand where the two vanishing points disappear, drawing lines that grow larger into the middle of the page made the building seem realistic. We used a reference image for this one.
• Image 4: Centre: We returned back to 1 point perspective, drawing the space we were in. The space was cluttered and oddly shaped, so it was difficult to get a clean vanishing point area. I think I did okay in this area, the overall perspective is okay, but the size of the chairs and studio spaces feels a bit to large.
• Image 5: Bottom-Middle: We went to the Japanese Gardens in the afternoon to do landscapes. I started on a rock near the weird little rock-falls place. I had a lot of birds to draw reference from, so this became more of an environment than a landscape. I felt like because I was completing these excercises so fast I was doing something wrong.
• Image 6: Top-Right: I moved back to the group, as I was previously drawing alone, and started working on the tree that they were all having fun with. There were even more birds. I feel like the tree could use some detail, but then with all the birds it could make it to messy.
• Image 7: Bottom-Right: I voiced my concerns with the instructor, and she led me to “The Turtle Area”, and told me to focus on details and light and shadow. I think this is the best of the lot, and even though it is very busy, it is still readable.

In the resolved work correlating to these excercises I resorted back to my usual method of just drawing, not thinking. Ultimately the end result felt a bit unresolved, but I didn’t know what to do without scrapping the whole thing. I used a reference image I took about 6 months before-hand, and tried to focus on the 1 point perspective, while also doing a landscape in portrait orientation.

Week 3: Life-Drawing in the Morning

• Image 1: We started off with life-drawing in the morning, with an actual model person who was naked. Initially it was really uncomfortable for me, but as it went on I realised it would be more embarassing for the person modelling, than for me, and I eventually calmed down. We started with non-dominant hand blind contour drawing, which was the bane of my existence, I couldn’t not look at what I was doing.
• Image 2: After the first one, we did dominant hand blind contour drawing, which while more comfortable was still a pain in the A, as the same issue persisted.
• Image 3: We were told to break the pose down into three lines. That’s about it.
• Image 4: We actually started the real life drawing. This one was a 10 minute in charcoal, with a prop too. I sort of messed up the prop, but I think the anatomy of the person is good.
• Image 5: Switched to pencil for this 5 minute posed, I struggled with the hands, and getting the features right.
• Image 6: I decided to do a mix of both pencil and charcoal, I think it turned out pretty well. The charcoal makes for an interesting and varied background, like static.
• Image 7: The final one we did a lying down pose, we had 30 minutes for it. I finished it before the 30 minutes are up, so I had fun smudging charcoal all over the place. The pose was really unique, and helped me understand the movement of human anatomy more.

Week 3: Flowers and Faces in the Afternoon

• Image 1: After the huge amount of drawing we did in the morning, we relaxed with some grid-portraiture and botanicals. I had never done a grid portrait before, but I had fun filling in the blocks until something good was created. I liked the contrast of the image I chose for this, so I coloured in with three tones. I think the eye could use a little work though. I don’t think I would have been able to draw this good of a human face without doing this excercise.
• Image 2: A botanical of a Dahlia, I put it in a textured bottle to give the drawing more detail.
• Image 3: A botanical of Russian Sage in a jar. At this point I think my drawing skills decided to fall asleep, this is not very good.

I went in the direction of a Botanical for my final Drawing Resolved Work, but I actually decided to use colour this time! I really like how it turned out, it almost reminds my of Studio Ghibli’s watercolour foliage and backgrounds.