It’s time for the weekly See Feel Paint update! YAY.
This week has been all about drawing {in both senses of the word} directly from nature. First, drawing to birdsong. Pauline recorded the most beautiful symphony of birdsong from her garden for us to draw to using various techniques, although for my second one I switched it up by using the live seagull cacophony that is my own daily soundtrack.
This first one I don’t like at all; very much a case of the process being where all the juice is. I have noticed that often the first exercise serves best as a warm up, during which I get a feel for what I’m doing, what will work, what won’t, what I enjoy most and so on.
For the second one I changed from oil pastels to soft pastels and although I think this one works better, I still don’t like it. I’ve shown it here with the air collage from last week as we were using it for colour inspiration.
In terms of mark making it was both an interesting exercise and I think pretty much works as an abstract drawing. I just can’t get away from feeling like all those little downward marks look like cartoon stubble. Have pretty effectively ruined it for myself there. 🙂
The next major exercise was networked drawings, which, Pauline taught us, are similar to contour or continuous line drawings. As she said, “It’s a very useful approach to drawing something which contains an almost overwhelming amount and density of visual information, such as the undergrowth of a tree or hedgerows etc in nature.”
Here’s my first effort, using an image Pauline gave us, although I later found that by lying in my roof garden and looking upwards from beneath my plants I could photograph some of my own. I love line, which I think shows here, and I’m pretty happy with the composition. Hardest for me is to understand where to put colour and how to lay down large areas of it without it looking like just a big mess.
Here’s the second one; I folded the reference image in half which gave a different composition. I’m still feeling a kind of ‘cartoony’ element here which I don’t love, but it’s a lovely exercise to do and a great way to practice such things as my difficulty with large areas of colour.
And here is a quick work in progress shot of a small acrylic painting on canvas, with reference image, which was taken just near my parents’ home. Indulging my love of ‘non local colours’ {just learned that phrase recently!} as usual. 🙂
I notice I’m still leaning towards copying the image whereas my interest lies much more in ‘abstractifying’ it, so it’ll be interesting to see how I’m going to do that!
I completed one other painting as well which I am going to give its own process post as it’s one of the best paintings I’ve ever done and I’m very excited about it. 🙂
