Drawings: OCA Part 2 IV: Project - Drawing Plants and Flowers

Exercise: Negative Space in a Plant 

Second Drawing

Biro - A3 Paper

 

First Drawing

Pencil - A3 Paper

 

Flowers and plants are certainly not my favourite subject which is probably why it has taken so long to put these pieces on my blog, I am ashamed to say that I think this lack of enthusiasm for them may show in some of my drawings.

I did find the first exercise quite interesting and it was quite a systematic procedure of just filling in the gaps once the features were planned out. I definitely prefer the second piece in biro; it is more interesting to look at and to complete, probably because it fills the page a lot better than the first.

Coloured pencil is also far from my favourite media to work in so needless to say the combination hasn’t produced my favourite results. I started the A2 piece and right from the beginning I really did not favour this piece one bit, this definitely shows unfortunately. I did come back for a second go, returning with a vengeance and a few sunflowers. I had a lot more determination to produce something better this seems to have worked. I tried a smaller scale and thought about the colours beforehand.

I found some interesting flowers in my garden and did some studies in coloured inks to start the third exercise, I quite like the piece with the three red flowers (I believe they’re tulips) but have mixed feelings about the other results. I experimented with combing coloured pencil with charcoal to produce the very dark piece with the poppies and the jug, the colours work well and I am satisfied with the shading.

 

Exercise: Plants and Flowers in Coloured Pencil. 

 

First Drawing - Poppies

Coloured Pencil - A2

Second Drawing - Sunflowers

Coloured Pencil - A4

Exercise: Drawing with other Coloured Media

 Tulips

Drawing Inks - A3

Daffodils

Drawing Inks - A3

Tulips

Drawing Inks - A3

Flowers in Stone Planter

Drawing Inks - A3

Poppies and Jug

Coloured Pencil and Charcoal - A4

 

Hanging Plant

Drawing Inks - A4

Learning Log

How will your experiments with negative space help your observational drawing in the future?

Concentrating on the negative space has helped me to understand how objects, like plants with their tangled stems, interact on a two dimensional plane. It helped me to start drawing what was actually in front of me more than just what I thought I was seeing.

What techniques did you use to ensure you drew your plants in proportion?

On these particular exercises I would start by deciding on a single feature such as a flower head and from then on I would compare the scale of the other objects and adjust the accordingly. This didn’t always work spectacularly but in a way it did help to maintain the natural feel, like the drawings were growing from a point.

How did you achieve an effect of three-dimensional space in your drawings?

I am not convinced that I did successfully achieve the effect in all of my drawings. It is achieved in some of them where I have controlled the tones and shading to describe shapes and to highlight the features that recede into the drawing and those that project forwards towards the viewer.

Drawings: OCA Part 2 III: Project - Drawing Fruit and Vegetables in Colour - Part III

Exercise: Drawing Using Oil Pastel

& Learning Log

 

 Final Drawing: Apples, Lemons and Baby Tomatoes

Oil Pastel - A3 Yellow Textured Paper

 

For this exercise I first started to play around with the composition, I was using a couple of tangerines and apples to try and get some strong contrast between the greens and oranges. I found a composition that I was happy with and attempted a quick drawing of this with oil pastels on a piece of A4 paper. I like the result and I think the contrast works really well, however there isn’t much range in shape or size so I added some lemons into the arrangement.

I decided to try and use a textured green coloured paper but it soon became apparent after I had started filling in some of the colour that I had made the wrong choice. I did a quick experiment on some textured yellow coloured paper and found this worked much better. I also made a last minute decision to swap the tangerines for some baby tomatoes to vary the range of shapes and sizes a bit more.

I used a chrome yellow to sketch in the main shapes as it was neutral colour that was not too heavy and was apparent in all the pieces of fruit. I then used a Van Dyke Brown to pick out the darkest areas before getting started on the rest. I used a bit of vermillion in the baby tomatoes, yellow ochre in these and the lemons. I found that a yellow grey pastel I had was the perfect tone for the apples as well as the shadow cast by everything. I was aware of how colours from some pieces of fruit were reflected in other, such as the green from the apples being seen in the lemons too, this helped to intensify the colours a bit more, giving a much stronger visual impact. I found that the colours worked really well together and against the yellow paper, it did take quite a while to build up the layers on it but I am very pleased with the final result.

 

Composition studies

Charcoal - A4

Study of apples and Tangerines

Oil Pastel - A4

Learning Log

Your composition should occupy most of the paper’s surface. How much negative space do you have left?

In terms of the way the composition fits onto the page, I would say I have done quite well. The subjects in my pieces sit quite comfortably without feeling like they are crammed onto the paper but also not getting swamped by extra space.

The piece I did of the apple with two lemons using the dip pens is a bit tight as the shadow is quite near the left edge, this is because I didn’t plot out the shadow before I went ahead with it so it could do with shifting to the right a bit.

I purposely left some negative space between the fruit in the final pastel drawing. I did this so that I could get a balance between drawing the pieces of fruit individually as well as allowing them to intersect each other in places.

What have you learned from drawing the details of fruit and vegetables?

I have learnt to try and think about the objects a lot more before I begin to draw them, and to work out how some will work well together and others maybe not so much. It was also interesting to try and capture the different textures of each individual piece of fruit whilst trying to maintain the relationship between them and keep the feeling that they are all part of the same drawing.

What did you find the most challenging about this part of the course?

It was difficult to know whether a composition would really work until I started to actually draw it, this is where doing the sketches for the last piece first really helped.

 

Experiments on Coloured Paper

Oil Pastel - A4

 

 

 

Drawings: OCA Part 2 III: Project - Drawing Fruit and Vegetables in Colour - Part II

Exercise: Using Markers or Dip Pens

 

 Orange, Pear and Lemons

Marker Pens - A4

Apple, Pear, Orange and Lemon

Marker Pens - A4

 

 Apple, Oranges and Lemons

Marker Pens - A4

 

I really enjoyed this exercise, both the process and the results captured my interest. Using coloured marker pens to draw with was a fairly new thing for me, I have never tried sketching anything out with them properly, so it was with a bit of trepidation that I began this exercise. It all turned out fine though and I became engrossed in building up the hatching, using the bold lines that are inevitable with marker pens. I had quite a good range of markers to utilise in these drawings and after some experimentation i dicovered that layering the dark blue and red close to each other formed a great dark tone for the shadowy parts.

 

I also produced a couple of drawings with the use of ink and dip pens. I have used dip pens before in my first assignment, but I stuck to black and sepia then, unlike in this exercise. I approached each drawing differently intentionally. With the first one I washed some rather bold strokes onto the paper with a brush, layering the red over the green where it was darkest and sketching the details in afterwards with a dip pen and black ink. The second drawing I did completely with a dip pen similar to my marker pen pieces, building up the hatching on different planes.

 

 

 Two Apples

Washed Ink and Dip Pens - A4

 

Apple and Lemons

Pen and Ink - A4

 

 

Drawings: OCA Part 2 III: Project - Drawing Fruit and Vegetables in Colour

Exercise: Using Hatching to Create Tone

 

 Studies of an Apple and Oranges

Watercolour Pencil - A4

 

 Studies of a Banana and an Apple

Highlighter - A4

Two Oranges and Lime in Wooden Bowl

Colour Pencil - A4

 

Redrawn Close-up of Previous Drawing 

I started this exercise using watercolour pencils in the first piece, beginning with the lighter ones and building the lines with darker ones like the purple and royal blues. I also experimented with highlighters though I can’t say I’m particularly pleased with the result but it was interesting to do.

 

I then positioned two oranges and a lime in a bowl and used colour pencil to draw this arrangement. I placed the bowl near a lamp to cause some strong tonal contrast and I think the highlight with the white pencil show this particularly well.

 

Just for curiosity as to whether this technique would also work well on a larger scale I used a viewfinder on the drawing and produced another one that increases the size of part of the original.

Drawings: OCA Part 2 II: Project - Still Life Revisited

Still Life Group in Tone

Oil Pastel A4

 

Because I wasn't entirely happy with my original attempt at this exercise as seen in my last post i decided to revisit it and have another go.

This time I stuck to cooler colours at the bluer end of the spectrum but used the same compositon so that i could compare the two results once finished. I definitely prefer this one, i find it a lot fresher and it feels much more harmonious.

Drawings: OCA Part 2 II: Project - Still Life

 Still Life Group using Line

Fine Liner and wash A3

 

Still Life Group in Tone

Oil Pastel A4

 

What aspects of each drawing have been successful, and what did you have problems with?

I really like the still life group using line, especially the mushroom and onion, these definitely worked well because of their shapes and textures. Unfortunately I feel the melon in the background was less successful, I found the texture was hard to capture correctly.

I can’t say the drawing of the still life group in tone is one that I particularly like but it did at least make me think about the tones more, as a positive I do like the colours I chose.

Did you manage to get a sense of depth in your drawings? What elements of the drawings and still life groups helped to create that sense?

The first drawing has a bit of depth to it and I think this was helped by the composition and the way that the objects build up as they go further into the drawing. If I’m honest I think the second piece is definitely lacking this.

What difficulties were created by being restricted to line or tone?

I found the main difficulty was that I wanted to be creative but the rules were quite prohibitive; I had to learn not to indulge the urge to be spontaneous. I also think that it is quite hard to accurately describe the objects without a combination of the two elements of line and tone.





Drawings: OCA Project - Detailed Observation

Line Drawing Detail

Fine Liner - A4

 

I thought a sliced through lettuce was ideal for this exercise, the swirling lines are almost like a labyrinth and it was an interesting process capturing them as they narrowed and broadened themselves all over the place.



Getting Tone and Depth in Detail
Pencil - A3

I chose a piece of firewood from our woodpile for this exercise, it’s a sawn off bit of a Cyprus tree with the seeds still attached. I used a range of pencils to hatch at different angles, it was hard picking out the different tonal values but I think I did alright.

Stipples and Dots

Ballpoint - A4

 

I found this poor thing clinging on to the end of its stem in the garden and thought it had some quite interesting and different textures to draw; I used a biro to try and capture them all. Though I can’t honestly say that I’m happy with the result it was still a good drawing experience.

 

Which drawing media did you find most effective to use, for which effects?

A fine liner is really useful for doing a strong clear line and it results in a very tidy drawing but a pencil is definitely more subtle. I like both and in the future I shall think a bit more about which to use before I start a drawing.

What sort of marks work well to create tone, pattern and texture?

I find I like hatching provided I have enough tonal differences in the subject that I’m drawing. Stippling gives an interesting texture but I don’t think that I chose the best object to try it on.

Did you enjoy capturing details or are you more at home creating big broad brusg strokes?

I like capturing different aspects of a subject and detail in certain parts can really lift it. I definitely like doing the broader sketches but I think if I can combine the two, then they might play off each other quite nicely.

Look at the composition of the drawings you hav done in this project. Make some sketches and notes about how you could improve your composition.

I drew the dead flower head in situ so I didn’t really put much thought into the composition but I could have played around with that a bit more. On the piece of wood I zoomed right in to get a close look but I could have added some more interest to the background and provide some sort of context for it.

Did doing a line drawing get you to look at space more effectively?

Definitely, it made me think twice before putting a line down to check that everything would fit where I wanted it too.