I spent a few weeks thinking about the items I would draw for this assignment; eventually I chose my trainers, one of my recent half marathon finishers medal and a vegan recipe book. These items say a lot about my approach to health and wellbeing and in a sense help keep me mentally and physically well. I took time to create a ‘stage’ and backdrop to help provide focus but also to capture some of the light – this was positioned on a table in front of me in natural light. I chose a position that I felt gave a good range of light and shade.
I worked on an A3 sheet of textured paper and used a range of hard and soft graphite pencils, a ball point pen, a black fine liner, a black coloured pencil and a charcoal pencil. I was most concerned with capturing the different textures and I used a range of mark making techniques to achieve this, I also used different drawing tools in layers to build texture and tone.
Below is the finished piece.
I think overall I was able to create a good representation, I am particularly happy with the way I built the layers and used different media together, however I feel I may have concentrated too heavily on the shoes and therefore rendering the other objects into the background. I also struggled with the ribbon and the book in terms of using the full range of tools to draw these (I mainly used pencil) which may be why they appear more dull. I have also struggled to give the image any sense of my own style or sense of emotion, I did want to use more sweeping lines to give a sense of joy consistent with one of the first exercises in the course but felt unable to move away from drawing a more accurate likeness.
Deborah McAulay 