Part three - Reflection

Reflection


On the assignment for this part of the course

Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills
I think I should have used a bigger selection of materials. For this part of the course I have mainly used pen, pencil and markers. I should have used some oil pastels or conte crayons for more of the exercises so that the collection was more diverse. I think the assignment would have benefited from something extra, and think now that I shouldn't have just used markers.
    I think my observation/visual awareness/design/compositional skills have improved, and I think they show in my assignment, apart from on one tile of the patio. One of the tiles on the patio, on the left, is slanted incorrectly. I was really annoyed at myself because this was a mistake - my hand slipped and then there was a pen line there and I didn't know what to do about it. I tried to even it back out so that it looked right but it still looks wrong now.
    Looking at the exercises now, I am not sure if I misunderstood the angular perspective exercise. I think this is because I looked at the example student drawing on the exercise page and should have focused more on the diagram at the top. I hope what I have done is ok.

Quality of Outcome
I think the outcome is a bit rough and I should have worked in some extra details with another medium. Maybe coloured pencils. Another issue is that line I mentioned above and I think that ruins the picture. I think that the exercises on foreground/middleground/background and perspective really helped as I think that the techniques show in the assignment.

Demonstration of Creativity
I think the scene I chose for the assignment is quite pretty, but maybe not the most interesting. Again I think I played it safe with the markers because I had used them a lot throughout this part of the course. But they are my favourite medium and I think it suits the topic.

Context
I think that looking at the work of Turner and Claude Lorrain was really useful as it really helps seeing how you can separate the foreground and background. I really like their use of colour and wish I had a more beautiful scene to portray for the assignment. I think it would be good to look at the assignment and exercises again when the weather has improved and there are more flowers and fuller trees to draw. I think my assignment and the pieces for the other exercises all look too cold and blue, but there is potential for pinks/oranges/yellows/etc in spring and summer.



On this section of the course as a whole

I think that this part of the course has been the hardest so far. I do not think I have done very well at all on this part of the course, as the only pictures I am at all happy with are the ones in the Perspective and Townscapes chapters.

I have never done landscape drawing before but I think that I am getting the hang of it after completing this section of the course. I really enjoyed the townscapes part of this section. I liked doing the line drawings of the buildings, especially the study with a drawing pen. I also liked doing the larger study of the tree.

I really enjoyed the sketchbook walk, I thought the drawings I produced for that were very good practice, because I can see a lot of mistakes and where I have done something wrong I can see how I could improve. I think the outcome of those drawings was fairly successful.

But I could not produce anything that I liked for the 360 degree study. I only liked 1 of the drawings that I did for that exercise (the East drawing), and wish I had chosen a different subject. I think I chose a bad day to do that exercise, as it was so cold that I couldn't stand being outside for more than 5 minutes at a time and couldn't wait to get back inside. I stood in the middle of a field and looked in all directions, but the views were not very interesting, apart from the pergola.

The weather conditions have certainly not helped through this part of the course - I wanted to draw outside for a lot of these exercises but it was almost impossible to do this because the weather has been consistently bad for several weeks! I got around this by taking photographs for a lot of the exercises but I do not think this was ideal and in hindsight I wish I had deferred this part of the course until later. I think the experience of drawing outside would have been much nicer a bit later in the year. For the few drawings I actually did whilst sitting outside it was pretty unbearable because it was so cold and this was fairly demotivating. I think doing this part of the course later on would have also made my drawings more interesting, as there would be more flowers and leaves on the trees, but the scenes I have drawn have been quite bare and desolate.

I will try these exercises again when the weather is better as I am really keen to get better at drawing landscapes.