This week the University took part in the Big Draw. It is the world's biggest drawing festival with thousands of enjoyable, and mainly free, drawing activities which connect people of all ages with museums, outdoor spaces, artists, designers, illustrators - and each other.
The main brief the foundation students were given was to seek out a degree student in their chosen field of study and shadow them for one day, creating a ‘portrait' of them afterwards. The portrait could range from a drawing to a 6 sec snapchat clip/ video/ sound piece to an object but the final outcome could not be bigger than a standard UK size stamp.
For my portrait I chose to draw Danny McGuire from BA Animation at Ravensbourne and this was the end result:
To produce this portrait I chose to use a style of working that I feel very comfortable with, first drawing with a black fine liner and then adding watercolour, focusing on areas of light and shade on the face and substituting skin colour with unconventional bright and vibrant tones of blue, pink and purple. Looking back on it now it almost looks comical, like an alien or an avatar...
Although I enjoyed doing this I felt that the brief to submit the drawing at the size of a standard UK stamp almost diminished the value of some of the works as this size was too small to see the detail in each portrait.
On Monday 19th we all took part in a workshop where we were given a series of 8 drawing tasks to do each being 15 minutes long and using different techniques giving us a chance to experiment with materials that we might not otherwise chose to work with.
"Paint as many portraits as you can in 15 minutes using watercolour"
"Draw a portrait of someone on your table focusing on tone using ink"
"Draw a portrait of someone on your table using ink and found objects"
For this I chose to use silver ink as I don't commonly work with it and the tip of a feather.
For this task we were told to use Lino cutting equipment to create a caricature of someone on our table however most people, including me, did not have the materials to do this so instead I used Black ink and a paintbrush to create my caricature.
For this task we had to create drawings for a Giff animation.
"Create a portrait of someone on your table using Fimo clay"
One of my favourite activities during this workshop was painting the watercolour portraits as this is my favourite medium to work with. This exercise also encouraged us to work quickly which I felt benefitted me as I usually take a long time to do even small drawings or paintings and I tend to focus a lot on detail and getting it exactly right. Doing these, I worked surprisingly quickly and I felt that the drawings weren't actually that bad, which has increased my confidence in being able to do quick drawings in my sketch book to show idea development.
I also found making the portrait out of Fimo clay particularly pleasurable as I have always enjoyed making models, and recently I have started to use clay more frequently.
With the exercises in this workshop being experimental and just for fun, I found it more enjoyable probably because we weren't pressured to produce any finished outcomes at the end; only to test and play around with different media.
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