Weekly Report: Week Commencing 25th November

I have worked on assignment 3 every day this week, the details of my explorations and results are in the posts that follow. 

Weekly Report: Week Commencing 18th November

This week I completed the project "Drawing Trees". On Saturday 23rd I spent the day at the archeological Museum in Naples drawing the statues. (See entry "drawing Statues revisited"). The finish line for part 3 is in sight and I am starting to warm up for drawing people which I suspect I will find more enjoyable than part 3 has been.

Drawing Statues: Revisited

I had the luxury of a whole afternoon to myself at the Archaeological museum in Naples so I took the opportunity to revisit drawing statues as a sort of prelude to part 4 of the course - the figure drawing section. Luckily, November is not peak tourist season so the museum was relatively quiet. I went into the room where the Farnese collection was and found several benches which were against a wall stopping people from looking over my shoulder. Consequently I felt quite relaxed with drawing in public which is a big step forward for me. I stayed for several hours and produced numerous sketches, some of which were more successful than others.

Hercules in Repose

I was quite pleased with my handling of the muscularity of the figure of Hercules for my first sketch. Unfortunately I hadn't planned the composition, I just started drawing and worked my way around the figure so he is consequently without feet.

Aphrodite

The cropping of the figure was intentional in this sketch. However, poor planning again led me to miss her left hand off the drawing. Some of the lines in this drawing have got a bit harsh, giving the statue a slightly robotic look. So I tried to simplify with a tonal version looking for the planes of light and shadow. I like this way of working but however there's something not quite right around her shoulders on this one.

Aphrodite - Tonal

I had prepared some paper in my sketchbook with a wash of watercolour to give a tonal ground which I could walk over with black and white. On the sketch below I tried working over this ground with charcoal and white conte'. Unfortunately the paper didn't have sufficient tooth so the conte' slid about all over the place and made drawing very difficult. This really didn't work - textured paper or sugar paper is better for this. Something to remember for future reference.

The next few sketches are of a statue entitled "Warrior Carrying a Dying Child". The part that attracted me particularly about this statue was the floppiness of the child falling down the warrior's back. I made several attempts at this statue. In my first attempt at the full statue in drawing pen the warrior looks rather squat and is face has a simian look about it - while this might be appropriate for the uncivilised nature of what he is doing, in actuality his features were more refined as I have represented in the corner of the page.

Next I made a couple of attempts at placing the state in context on the plinth and in the museum. First I really struggled with the perspective of the plinth and then I also had trouble because I seemed to have included the plinth as an afterthought and the statue looked as if it was about to take off from the back edge of the plinth in my pen and wash drawing. 

I tried a tonal drawing of the statue of Hermes. this again ended up with a very strong brow giving it a simian look.

Finally I went on to the biggest challenge- The Farnese Bull. This is a very large and complex statue with multiple figures. I had been attracted to it by the strong negative shapes between the figures. Unfortunately when I started to draw I somehow managed to forget whet my original intention had been and get distracted my the  massive amount of detail in front of me. The result is a very busy and rather uninspiring pencil drawing. Yet another lesson about selecting what is important and sticking to it when drawing. I'm still not able to do this very well. I subsequently chose just a small section of the statue for simple pen and wash treatment but I thin perhaps a better development would be just to pick out the  negative shapes from my original drawing missing out the detail. 

At the end of the day I ended up with a banging headache from concentrating so hard but I was glad I'd done it and it put me in the mood to complete part three so I can move on to section 4 of the course and start drawing real people.

Check and Log: Drawing Trees

How many different tree types have you drawn?

I think I've drawn about 18 different types of tree but I'm not entirely sure as some of them were quite distant and I didn't identify what they were.

What techniques did you use to distinguish each type?

I looked at the overall shapes of the trees and then I also looks at the texture and density of the foliage to decide what sort of marks to make to suggest it. For example, long flowing shapes for willow beaches and more abrupt straight jagged marks on pines. 

What did you do to convey the mass of foliage?

It was winter, so many of the trees I drew had very sparse or no foliage. On the evergreens I tried to mark in the basic shape of the mass of foliage and the put marks for shading and texture in the shaded areas. On my larger study of several trees I just put a suggestion of foliage with patches and splatters of colour. I did not include any detail on the foliage  there. On the olive trees I really struggled with the foliage because it consists one very small lives which are much lighter in tone than the shaded trunks beneath them. I tried just to give a suggestion of the texture of the foliage with a few marks but drew very little in this area. I let the shading on the trunk below the foliage delineate the outline of the mass of foliage but was careful not to get to detailed and outline the foliage itself.

How did you handle light on the trees? Was it successful?

In some of the smaller sketches I used erasure of charcoal on illuminated ares. One of the biggest challenges I came across in this project was sunlight shining through the branches of the trees on the study of several trees. I tried may different experiments in trying to tackle this but it still wasn't entirely successful. 

Did you manage to elect and simplify? Look at your drawings and make notes on how you did this, and what could you do better?

Initially I did not select and simplify enough when drawing close up views of my garden trees in pencil. I tried to include too much detail of the foliage. I found it much easier to simplify when drawing distant trees in charcoal. When drawing the skeletons of winter trees I initially tried to include too many of the branches but I did manage to be more selective about this on the larger study. When drawing the olive trees I got drawn in to the texture of the trunks and tended to neglect the overall shape of the trees. I have improved my selectivity on the whole over the course of this project but there is still room for improvement. I find simplification especially difficult when I am drawing a tree that is very close to me. It si still very tempting to try to draw the details of every leaf and twig.

Project Drawing Trees: Study of Several Trees

It was lucky that at in November we had a series of those lovely, bright, crisp winters mornings. Each morning after dropping my son at school I went down to the river where there are lots of trees to sketch. 

In this first sketch, the trees looked very dark in tone against the brightly lit green of the grass. (the second one on the same page I have already talked about when describing the exercise : sketching a single tree)

The sun was low in the sky causing long shadows between brightly illuminated tracts of grass and soil. 

The sun behind the tree branches produced a bright but diffused light as it filtered through the branches and twigs. I was squinting into the sun. This was difficult to represent - here I have tried adding a blob of go ache over graphed and scraping it outwards like rays with my fingers but this hasn't really been successful because the gouache has a warmer tone than the paper.

On the opposite side of the road bridge was a copse of trees with light coloured bark. I was viewing these from the opposite direction with the light behind me so these trees looked light in comparison to the background shapes. They had been plated in a very regular and linear pattern. For some reason this copse reminded me of Paul Nash - maybe due to the height of the trees and their regularity. Click here and here for examples of trees in Nash's work. 

I drew three small sketches of these trees, one colour and two black and white to emphasise the regularity and recession of the vertical forms of the trunks. On balance though, I didn't find this subject as interesting as the view looking into the sun with the long shadows coming towards me. I decided to develop that view further with some colour sketches.

 Here, I was looking at the recession of the line of trees drawing the eye up the page

In this one I found that the a wash of water soluble coloured pencil was good for the luminosity of the grass as being translucent it allowed the white of the paper to shine through.

Here I was experimenting with trying to capture the effect of the sun through the branches. I tried working over coloured pencil with neo-colour water soluble crayon but the effect was less than impressive. I then tried using masking fluid to keep the area of paper white before drawing the trees. i then works outwards from this piece of white paper in white neo-colour to try to represent the fact that the branches look indistinct and irregular when squinting into the sunlight. 

I did an A1 study in charcoal (at home developed from my sketches and reference photos):

In this one I masked out the area for the sun before starting to draw. Once I had drawn in the shapes of the branches i then used a rubber in rapid outward strokes to try to represent the diffused light and indistinctness of the branches. I also used the blubber in the foreground to represent the texture of the fallen leaves on the ground. The result is Ok but the shadows in the foreground don't have quite the drama of my original small sketch.

I then moved on to a colour study:

Here I have used several different media. I have used water-colour washes and splashes of gouache to represent the remaining foliage on some of the trees. The dark silhouetted trees are represented very starkly with black india ink. The sun is gouache and neo-colour crayon.  I have used water soluble coloured pencil for washes in the background on the bright and grass and then I have used the same pencils in the foreground with multiple layers of colours. I think this does give an impression of aerial perspective, depth and distance. Overall I am quite pleased with this although the end result could be considered decorative rather than realistic. It may also be a bit overworked in the foreground.

The one part that I was not happy with, however was the sun filtering through the trees. This was the part of the scene that really attracted me and it was also the most challenging part of the drawing. I didn't think I'd got this down so I continued to experiment in my sketchbook.

First I tried a mixture of water soluble coloured pencil combined with neo-colour sticks dipped in water plus the addition of white gouache.

Then I tried tracing the basic shapes onto a piece of acetate from the screen of my i-pad. Then I turned the acetate over onto a page of my sketchbook and rubbed my hand over it. The resulting image was ghostly and there were some interesting marks produced which I worked into with drawing pen. 

I really liked the marks made this way especially the simplicity of that tingle tree. I tried again with a different photograph. 

This time I accidentally moved the acetate sheet while I was rubbing it so there was nothing resampling a picture on the page but I still liked the marks and thought they would make and interesting background textural element. I worked over this with water soluble coloured pencil and india ink. I tried to draw around the negative spaces between rather than trinng to draw the actual branches: I liked the results of this:

Next I used the acetate itself and used a combination of permanent marker, oil pastel and neo-colour crayon:

I ended up drawing on both sides of the acetate when trying to give the impression of the sun's rays overriding the tree branches. The result was colourful and lively but not really that much better at capturing the effect I was aiming for.

Next I tried working with gouache over india ink trees. I thought the opacity of the gouache might help in overriding the stark shapes of the branches:

This gave some idea of the effect I was aiming for but I think this could be pushed a lot further. Some of the experiments I produced reminded me of some of Mondrian's tree abstractions.  Click here and here to link to images. This was not intentional, but I had been looking at these shortly before I embarked on this project so they obviously were exerting an influence. 

 Other images of trees which I found interesting were in some of Egon Schiele's landscapes link by clicking here and here and here. I only found these after I had done the exercise but I liked them because the lightness of the background seems to alms overwhelm the tree forms which is similar to the effect I was trying to get. 

I have also always liked Gustav Klimt's birch trees, and Fir Forests and this may be what I had subconsciously in mind when I was attracted to the light colour and uniform arrangement of the copse I drew earlier.

I really enjoyed these exercises. Much more so than the townscapes. I'm much more at home with organic forms than straight lines.

Weekly Report: Week Commencing 11th November

Very tired this week after my hectic week of work last week. It took until nearly the end of the week to get myself over the 'jet lag' and back to living in daylight hours. Since then I have been mainly drawing trees.

Random sketchbook "Art Every Day of November"

Here are a few examples of random work which I posted on the Facebook group "Art every day of November". I was not particularly selective about what I posted - that was the point- to show others my work even when I was not satisfied with it.

Day 1: Self portrait - this is more like the ubiquitous 'selfie' than a self portrait
given that it was rapidly and spontaneously executed. I like the quality of line
that comes from drawing 'blind'

Theme:Love

Theme: love (tonal)

Theme: Love - development 

Theme: Love- development

Self Portrait after a 16 hour nightshift without a break

Sleeping cat: the challenge was to include text

Inchies: Drawings of trees 1 inch square in size

Mr Print lives in a valley between the fingertip mountains,
he doesn't mind the isolation or the fact that it's a long
drive to the nearest supermarket but sometimes he wishes
the sun would shine into his valley.

Weekly Report: Week Commencing 4th November

Another tough week away at work but I have drawn some trees and I have managed to stick to my resolution of drawing something and posting something to the web every day. A lot of what I produced was blind drawing and very quick doodles but I have at least stuck to the plan and have not over-edited my posts. I have received mostly positive feedback for my work from the supportive group.

Weekly Report: Week Commencing 28th October

Back from Venice late on Monday evening. 

I have spent most of this week working on the project 'Drawing Trees'. I am making slow but steady progress.

This week I have also signed up for a Facebook group "Art Every Day of November" in order to challenge myself to establish the habit of drawing something every single day. To be in this group I have to draw something every day and post it on to Facebook. When I'm working on coursework I will post that but my plan with this is to establish the habit to keep drawing - even if it is just a small doodle even when I am very busy and tired after work. Good habits are hard to establish. Bad habits are hard to break. I'm hoping that by re-enforcing this good habit every day throughout November that it will become more ingrained and less likely to slip in the future.The other benefit to me will be that is I have committed myself to posting something every day which will mean that I will inevitably have to post work which I'm not happy with. This will be good for me. It's time I got over myself and became more honest, less precious and less selective. I'm trying to overcome the feeling that my art is private -a furtive activity I only do behind closed doors and which will only see the light of day when I feel it is ready (which might be never).

Project Drawing Trees: Larger Study of an Individual Tree

I have always really liked the character of gnarly old olive trees. I like their shape and the texture of the bark so I decided to choose an old olive for this exercise. There is a collection of particularly lovely ones outside the local garden centre and it was a sunny day so I decided to perch on the ground there and make some sketches. I started with a blind contour drawing to warm up and get me into the mood and then I looked more closely at the overall shape and the intricate patterns of texture on the bark. The challenging thing about the olive trees is that their foliage is quite spiky small leaves and the leaves are quite pale in colour in comparison to the shaded trunks. It was actually the tricks that interested me the most so most of my small sketches concentrated on this area.

While I was sketching, the owner of the garden centre came out to see what I was doing and I sold my first ever picture! well maybe 'sold' is a bit strong. He asked me to draw his favourite olive tree for me and in return kept me supplied with bottles of water and espresso. He seemed quite pleased with the result. After the owner I had a steady stream of garden centre employees coming out to see what I was doing but I continued to draw. This was a major step forward for me as a few weeks ago I would have made an excuse to pack up and leave as soon as anyone showed interest in my drawings.

In the A4 sized sketches I have used drawing pen and worked into this with graphite and also with charcoal which I have moved around with a bit of water. 

The instructions for the larger A3 piece the instructions were to use a fine drawing medium so I ditched the additional charcoal and thickly shaded graphite and stuck to the fine drawing pen. I also tried to show the overall shape of the tree by including the foliage. To my eyes, this seems to have been a retrograde step. The sketches where I concentrated on the trunk as well as using more than one medium are more expressive and I think actually capture better what makes the real character of the olive tree.