Week 10 - Stylised Trees Project & Life Drawing

Stylised Trees Project - Development

Firstly, I went on a trip to a local park, to take photographs, to use as reference for developing my initial silhouettes. These included photographs of tree barks and leaves. Apart from this I have also used some of my previously taken photographs, from the trip to the Bradgate park. I have done all of the design work such as: silhouettes, colour studies, shape warping and final concepts in Photoshop CC. 

 

At the start of my design process, I went ahead quite early with a few of my ideas and decided to develop them further, into concepts. The problem was I rushed too much and was unhappy with how these concepts turned out. I asked a couple of my fellow students for a peer assessment of my work so far. Then just as I thought, my ideas and silhouettes were not good enough. At this point I made the decision to go back to gathering new reference, but this time I focused on Bonsai trees, mainly for their stylised appearance and small size.

I surprised myself with new and even more outstanding ideas; which I wouldn’t have thought of before. The stylisation seemed more interesting and the tree silhouettes were much clearer to understand/visualise.  I learned here to pay more attention to what reference I use and also to revisit my mood boards/silhouettes more often; to add more to them, as I found out how greatly my work benefitted from doing so.

Life Drawing

I really looked forward to this week's life drawing. This was our first session working on mid tone paper, meaning that I was able to use dark mediums like willow charcoal, as well as brighter mediums such as white chalk. It was a very useful technique, as the colour of my paper can could be used as the midtone for whatever I was drawing. If I drew a person like I did then, the colour of my paper could have been the same as the model's skin. That way my drawings would already appear more convincing and seem more accurate/realistic. 

As usual I began with a few warm up, gestural drawings. I was not too happy with my results here, partly due to my inexperience with using charcoal, but I continued on. My first 2 drawings were fairly bad and were not accurate enough to me; then on the following 2 I started to get into the rhythm of drawing. The proportions started to be more accurate, the posture I described was cleared to see and my drawings came together more nicely.

After the warm up drawings, it was time to draw larger studies, this time using charcoal and white chalk. The drawing process immediately dragged me in, as I was seriously enjoying the extra freedom of using dark and white mediums. I could confidently place marks, then adjust them by mixing the white and dark marks; pushing certain areas (such as body parts farthest away from me) back with the darkness of the charcoal and bring the brighter areas (such as shoulders, knees or thighs) out by carefully layering marks of white chalk. I was eventually getting impressed with my results as I did not know how effective this style of drawing was. I was fairly new to drawing on midtone paper as well.

This technique of drawing became another area for me to focus on in the future, as the results I produced were incredible to me. Especially when I thought about the time I've spent on them. The first large study took me roughly 10 minutes and was already close to looking like a finished piece. If I attempted to draw it using graphite pencils, I would not get such results in twice the time.

The second study, turned out even better than the first one. In this one I had double the time (20 minutes). An area I wanted to then try, was to add a more complex background. Therefore I went ahead and started marking out the model; at the same time roughly marking out the surroundings too. There were many shadows and dark areas behind the model so I covered this area with some black charcoal, to push the model's shape out more. The angle of her body was tricky to draw, but the use of white chalk has greatly helped me here. I drew the body sections furthest away from me first, then used a white chalk to add on the closer parts (on top of the darker ones). This way I created some basic depth, as the white chalk separated the different body parts from the darker ones well. My final result generally made the model appear to have mass; she fitted in the scene and didn't appear to be floating, what I was really happy about. Next time I will work more on drawing details, as the chalk and charcoals I had were fairly chunky and didn't allow me to draw small details well.