Develop Your Drawing 4 : Changing View Points

This week in drawing class at City Lit we got to play with colour!! 

 Warm up was with graphite sticks following ' skylines' of  shapes of still life  without looking at paper - first with sharp end then blunt, broader marks.

 Then 1st exercise with red, blue and orange pastels : elipses in red, vertical lines  in blue, horizontal  lines in orange. Then for 2nd exercise the still life was moved 90 degrees and  exercise repeated  with blue elipses, orange vertical lines, red horizontal lines.



 For 3rd exercise the  still life was moved a further 90 degrees and  zooming in on detail  with v large orange elipses

 Next the challenge was to work into what you had , joining up areas  with addition of black and white, developing a composition. Started with applying charcoal to to all the white areas to provide a toned background  and rubbing everything back with a rag ( absolutely filthy at the end of the session! )

 Break for coffee and Portuguese tart then more work  adding darker areas, trying to pull the picture together.

Final  version improved by cropping  but ran out of time to increase range of tones with more darks and lights. Composition isn't great- it's  hard  working on such a  large scale  and could have done with more variety of marks. But I had fun!!

 

 

Nothing to show here for the printmaking this week. Apart from taking in some black paper to take some embossed prints of my collagraph plates I was mainly preparing a plate for hard ground etching. Polishing the plate with brasso  reminded  me still need to do the knocker on our newly painted front door! Then it was bevelling edges  with file;  degreasing with ammonia/ whiting mix and applying and removing hard ground wax with a roller ( a knack that obviously needs  considerable practice) Anne-Marie was very patient with me.