Traditional Drawing (Week Twentyfive - David Hyde)

This week, we were tasked with doing interior drawings of the guildhall.

This was a difficult location to draw as a lot of the interiors had a black and white contrast which made it difficult to distinguish the value of the lighting.

I however did what I knew how to do, which was plot down all the darkest values first. Drawing shadows on top of the darkes bits was a challenge due to the shadows being cast over already borderline black marks on the page.

However, overall, I believe I captured the sense of the location. Which gives you a good understanding of the architecture and time period. Much like my previous location drawing, it was a lot more difficult to plot details as drawing texture with pencils on such a small scale due to the composition is something that is very challenging to carry out.

I however didn't want to change the composition as there would not be any specific focal point and would defeat the objective of the location drawing.

Traditional Drawing (Week Twentyfour- David Hyde)

This week, we were tasked with creating a landscape drawing.

This was a good time to utilise my previously learned perspective skills and composition techniques.

I knew I wanted to make a centre focal point, which made this piece look like a one point perspective, when in fact, it ended up being 2 point.

Overall this piece was very strong, there were a few initial errors with lines converging when they should have run parallel 'til the vanishing point, this was obvious on the church bricks.

But after finding the main leading lines, I followed these back to correct the shape of the lines and made sure to follow the others for a structurally sound piece.

Traditional Drawing (Week Twentythree- David Hyde)

This week, we were tasked with doing renaissance style portraiture, with a focus on accurately portraying features of the model.

I had a few issues when it came to this task, my main issue was structure, laying down basic shapes. Fore example, I followed the contour of certain shapes, like the nose, when I should have laid down a 'trapezoid' shape do help define it and fill it in correctly.

This was a theme with this work, furthermore - I struggled to place the eyes correctly, not so much the measuring, but the overall shape. For future reference, I will need to work on the shape a lot more, that way it will make structure easier to understand.

Overall, I believe this piece is one of the worse pieces of portraiture I have done, as it is aiming to be very accurate, without understanding the base structure, it knocked my confidence on doing portraits like this.

Mainly due to a lack of understanding of forming the shapes to get the structure.

Traditional Drawing (Week Twentytwo- David Hyde)

This week we had to use a colour palette of our choice within the realms of a self portrait or a portrait of someone close to us.

My painting choice was 'Queen Elizabeth I (The Ditchley portrait)'

Consisting of various whites, oranges and blues.

I wanted to capture these colours as they contrasted well together, additionally using this palette could also partially reflect skin tone, containing orange and its hues in one form or another.

The most difficult part about this piece was actually using the coloured pencils. Because it was a case of using it once, if you didn't accurately portray an area it was difficult to remove it.

Furthermore, the pencils I used weren't a good enough grade to build the colour on top, I purposefully didn't press down on the work as to make it easier to erase if something went wrong.

Painting of my choice

Traditional Drawing (Week Twentyone - David Hyde)

This week, we had a model come in so we could do further head construction.

I believe the task went well, although there were a few critiques to be made. 

The main critique I had was, when initially drawing the model, I made the eyes too big. It was a lot more difficult to measure the eyes on the face given that it was at a 3/4 angle rather than a straight forward view.

However, to circumvent this, I was advised to only do semi-circles for the main iris part of the eye and add some shadow to the eyes in order to get a core shadow as 'eyes are not always 100% white'.

Furthermore, another issue I had was line work, Kras pointed out that my lines were very dense in some places where they didn't need to be. I mainly did this to accent the darkest shadows. but instead I erased these lines and proceeded to do a gradient of dark shading where these lines once were.

I have a lot of good tonal variation in the piece which gave the model definition and accents in places like the nose, mouth and chin.

Traditional Drawing (Week Twenty - David Hyde)

This week we did the plaster head drawings for head construction in our lesson. The goal was to do 2 timed pieces of work, both of which were separate faces. 

The thing that was pointed out as being the flaw with my work was the following. When drawing the head, I have a habit of drawing the form with line rather than shading to identify facets and form within the plaster head. This was rectified with the second drawing.

I did this because we were always reminded to make sure out structure was correct before going in to shading.

I believe the second head is stronger because there is more flow within the shading, showing where the light is coming from and clear indication as to where features are on the face.

Drawing 1

Drawing 2

Traditional Drawing (Week Nineteen - David Hyde)

This week, we carried out the drapery task.

I found it very interesting, taking into account the contour of the folds we had to follow. Overall, this piece is very strong, however, there were a few mistakes I kept making.

My main mistake was constantly trying to get an equilibrium in the tones of the drawing, which made the mid-tones and darkest tones almost the same, however, I made the darker tones even darker to try and distinguish this mishap.

Furthermore, another issue I had was trying to hatch along the curvature of certain folds, although it is not that noticeable, when viewed up close, it made the work look scratchy, however, to fix this I used the side of my pencil to smoothly smudge the lines a bit in order to maintain the shape.