Observational Drawing Practice

Today we went out into Leeds with our sketchbooks with the intention of building our skills in observational drawing. Our task was to capture what we saw and translate this into a visual image.

We were given a list of things to draw:

Something from above

Something unnecessary

Something walking

Something architectural

Something old

Something organic

Something unnoticed

Something held in your hand

Something that made you smile

Something you smelt

Something you heard

I often use references, real life objects to inform my drawings, but I often change what I see in order to create an interesting and appropriate illustration depending on the purpose and audience that I am producing it for. I might change the colours, change the patterns or the shape so that it works with the words or style that I want.

I also spend as much time as I need to capture this image. I may take a photo of it or revisit it.

I'd not really spent much time trying to draw from real life before because the process makes me feel nervous. 

To stand in the middle of a group of people and draw them worries me because I know that other people would be able to see what I am doing. I like to draw in private and only show my work when it is complete or when it is at a stage that I am happy with it.

I know that this is not a productive way of working and that getting into the habit of this activity would make it less daunting. I hope that it will also improve my drawing abilities if I continue to 'work out' and build my drawing muscles!

These drawings are awful. They're wonky and disproportional and ugly. 

They make me want to learn how to draw properly.

At the beginning of today's task, my drawings were still very illustrative and a lot of the details were fabricated from my own mind and imagination. I relied on memory rather than vision to help me to keep up with the fast-paced buzz of the city life.

I need to learn to keep my eye on the game and speed up my drawing! I think that the best way to do this will just be to train myself, pushing every day to do at least one observational drawing from life.

I wasn't considering the space of the page at all.

The composition of the page was chaotic; all of my little drawings were crumpled together on one page. I need to be selective.

(Above is a silly drawing of an old man and his stumped, almost squatting posture. This is a really simple line drawing focusing on the shape of his body as well as the negative space around him, but it really did made me chuckle. This song sums up my feelings towards this illustration: Roobarb and Custard Theme Tune)

I liked the quick rush of capturing elements from one face and moving on to another individual's body or torso to build an amalgamation of the two.

I noticed that my mood affected my drawing style.

Being silly, joking and staying with my friends led to really quite odd and playful images. I'm not sure that this is effective in producing an accurate image, but I think that this might be useful to know when trying to make humorous illustrations in the future.

I did most of my drawing today with quite a thick brush pen. The Berol Broad helped me to stop making indecisive, unconfident, feathered lines as I might with finer pens or pencils and forced me to make bold, certain marks. 

This choice of pen had its negatives: the pressure I applied made little difference on the boldness of the line, the pen was very thick and didn't allow for blending, the thickness of the pen meant that I couldn't add small details.

Next time I would like to work with colour, a range of pencil hardness and boldness, pen and ink. I need to explore a range of media to see how I work best and what quality of line I can achieve from them.

I kept reverting to an illustrative style, changing the view in front of me to what I would expect to see, or what I wanted to see. Eyes became Nick Sharrat style dots, noses became simple lines. Characters evolved. This was not the intention of the task and I really struggled to keep within these restrictions.

Although the proportions of this image are completely wrong, I think that this image is one of the best I made today. I zoned in on one specific point of vision (a girl drawing), which was not moving too much so gave me the time to document her details. I think that practicing drawing static objects like statues or items on my desk might help me to get used to the process before I attempt to tackle humans again.

I'd like to prepare some grounds to work on top of, giving texture and information to the blank spaces.

Architecture is not my thing. It doesn't really excite me, but there are some beautiful buildings in Leeds. I don't think I've ever really looked up at it before.
I tried to sketch a building. It wasn't an awful first attempt, but I didn't like it. It had no depth, no sense of the immense scale that this building dominated. No power. This drawing is not worthy of comparison to the actual building. How can such a big thing be drawn on a small piece of paper? How can I show the details from so far away?

A different approach to drawing a building. Thick lines and shapes. I think that I prefer this method and especially like the solid black shapes within the windows, breaking apart the interior and exterior.

This technique of blocking out the separate shapes that make up the buildings helped me to increase the speed of drawing, working at a fast pace to get the vision onto paper. I think that finding a balance between speed drawing and slowing down to build on more intricate details is important. It's just a matter of scaling with the eye what needs attention and what doesn't require so much focus.

This is an example of how my drawing improved throughout the day. My hands began as very simple twig-like sprouts, but by the end of the day I was attempting to document the lines and curves of every finger. Taking it slowly, I could then draw hand gestures and my hands grew more realistic every time I drew them.

I'm excited to find out how my work develops through this project and I want to maintain a healthy drawing lifestyle. I enjoyed the intensity of today, of devoting such a long time to just drawing and it was fun to get outside and active with illustration.