Tutor feedback Assignment 2

SELF PORTRAIT

Marvellous self portrait. Now I know what you look like! Good tone and size, Full page. Not a lot of variation of mark, but what you have used works nicely. Do try to follow the contours with your drawing and shading lines. For instance, your shading flattens the face and hair due to the straight lines you’ve used. Imagine the same shading but following the contours, or applied in the direction of the hair itself. If you cannot imagine this , then try it on a piece of paper. 

This is a similar comment to my last assignment (from a different tutor) about using more variety in my mark making so it's clearly something I need to work on. I've used a lot of soft blending strokes here. I decided to make some small changes to the drawing by adding more contour to the shading on the face and hair as my tutor suggested.

Original A3 pencil

Changed A3 pencil

  I didn't want to make to many changes as it would darken the tone a lot so it's not easy to see. I've changed the direction of the pencil strokes in the hair which was very noticeable and I also tried to give more shape to the shading on the cheeks and eyes.

I thought I'd have a scribble on fresh paper to see if I could create more depth using contours and other marks.

 The drawing is dreadful but it was an interesting exercise as I had to keep stopping myself from doing bland shading and do more of a contour hatching stroke. This is exaggerated but hopefully next time I'll incorporate some of these marks. 

FIGURE DRAWING

This is an excellent work. You’ve observed the subject in great detail and managed to transfer much of that observation to the paper. The hatching works nicely to suggest the solidity, with your lines nicely following the surfaces to give a lovely roundness. The comments you make on your blog are valid. The best thing about them is that you have made the good observations, recognised the faults, thought about them, and the next stage is to remember or refer back to them, work out the answers, (i.e. ensure you measure with your thumb the size of the head early on in the drawing.) when carrying out other work making sure you don’t repeat mistakes. You’ve learned how unforgiving pen is. So make sure you do enough preparatory work before tackling the next important pen drawing. Also you may find it helpful to sketch as a product designer does, where exact lines are needed with no space for corrections, - with your hand imitating the movement and line you propose, above the paper before touching ink to paper.

Feel pleased with yourself as this is affine piece to submit. I would however just suggest one point , that you sketch a suggestion of background, so the model is not sitting in mid air. It is important to always place your subject in a context.

For a moment think of the background in your reclining blue figure. Imagine that drawing without the background, and then your hatched sketch with that much background as the blue one contains.

I can clearly see what she means. I roughly drew in a background trying to figure out where the shadows would be. I found a similar area in the house and used that.

Original A2 pen

Changed A2 pen

 The changed drawing is definitely better. The background finishes the drawing off and more importantly doesn't detract from the figure. Unfortunately I can't do much about her exceedingly large head but I've learnt lots.

Tone - 2hrs – x1 drawing -A3 – model reclining

I love this drawing. It is competent, creative, and emotional. The use of those colours suggests an exotic and emotional scene. Had you kept only to the blue it could have been cold, but the purple warms and with the strength of the blue, gives a strong atmosphere. I see that you tried orange as well. You were correct that the complementary colour dulls, but this is when added as a mix. It dulls and does not change the tone though. It can also be used alongside the base colour to make the colour stand out.

 This was very interesting regarding the colour mixing.  In this case the orange would make the blue jump off the page and vice versa. I'm just used to using paints to create different colours. I had to go back to my colour theory from my last course.

This is the colour wheel showing opposite colours and where my theory came from.

We also studies how placing different colours next to each other affect the colours.

You can see that in the bottom row the blue square jumps out when it's surrounded by orange but recedes when its surrounded by green.

 Likewise, the orange square looks like a different colour when its surrounded by red compared to the blue.

So for conte pencils and other media like this that don't mix you have to think of a different way to create tone and shading. A single colour drawing obviously requires just increased pressure or layering but in this case choosing another similar colour like the purple works best.