Life drawing : Colour

This weeks life drawing was focused on colour, and using colour that wouldn't be used normally, like blues and greens. I think this sometimes worked well, but It was hard to know how much colour to put on without making it look very unnatural. I feel I have got better at looking at proportions, and I've found that I am not rubbing out lines as much. Yellow ochre and other earth colours made quite convincing flesh tones, but I enjoyed experimenting with other, brighter colours like yellow, orange and bright pink

We then added ink, using prussian blue to make the shadows and darker areas, then worked into the ink with pastels for the lighter areas. On the ink and pastel drawings, I tried to only use two or three pastel colours, because of the dark tone of the ink, and the mid tone of the paper, I didn't want them to be too busy.

I am pleased with this drawing, because I think I have used the tone of the paper well, and I have used white and yellow for highlights, and brown pastel and blue ink for shadows and darker areas.

Life drawing: Tone.

This week, we were using tone, with no lines. I found this very hard because it was difficult to put the blocks of tone in the right place and still get the proportions right. I also found it took more time to build the image, whereas with line it is easy to get the basic shapes in fairly quickly. I also found that the background plays a big part in the range of tones, as a dark background makes the figure look lighter and vice versa.At the start, we were just using charcoal on white cartridge paper, but I found it difficult to get the full range of tones, because a lot of shading was needed to make it dark enough that only the lightest highlights were still white.

Next, we shaded in the whole of the paper grey with charcoal, so that was a mid tone, and more charcoal could be added to make it darker, and it could also be taken away with a putty rubber to make it lighter. I found this a lot easier, because the background meant I had a shade to compare the figure to. If a part was lighter the background, I used the putty rubber, but if something was darker than the background I added more charcoal. This meant I didn't have to shade parts of the background in to make the figure look lighter. The only bit I didn't like was the way that the charcoal background picked up the texture of the drawing board underneath, so it wasn't a flat colour.







After this, we used creamy beige coloured sugar paper, with white chalk and charcoal, so the background was quite light. I had to shade in the background to make it contrast with the figure.

My favourite way of drawing with tone was with the three different colours, black (charcoal) white, and red (chalk) and we were still working on the sugar paper. When the red and white mixed, it made pink, and when the red and black mixed it made a brown.

I think working with tone has made me look closer at the different shapes and blocks of tone, instead of assuming, to capture the contours of the body realistically.

Fine Art

 This is the first piece I made, using a variety of methods to get my objects onto the paper. I used a projector to change the scale of my objects, like the pink scissors and the washer and bolt, and drew around them as well, to portray the same objects in different ways. I used poster paint, pencil crayon and pastel to get different textures and effects, but only used four colours, pink, purple, blue and green.

 I like this one because it is more direct, I used objects to apply the paint to the paper, such as a fork, a yoghurt pot, a piece of string, and then because my hands were covered in pink paint from the string, I made hand prints  instead of just drawing around them like I did  previously.

This one is one of my favourites, because I like the contrast between the very precise, almost photographic nature of the background with the random, messy blue on top. I found that dropping the paint-covered string, rather than laying it down, made better patterns and wiggles. I also like the simple blue and brown colour-scheme, because I think the brown makes the blue look bluer.

I like the contrast between the pink and green on this one, and the simplicity of the design. I added the blue right at the end, because without it, the colours felt too unbalanced because there was no mid tone in between the bright pink and the dark green.

I used rolled up paper and a projector to make the green spirals. I liked the green and brown together, and they looked very natural together, so I decided to add the blue as a contrast and focal point. I used the same method of dropping the string I used earlier, so the random patterns contrasted with the repetition of the background.