I started off by drawing the base of an old tree and pillbox, but I accidentally chose the wrong paper that didn’t have enough tooth to allow me to build up tone, so I finished it as much as I could before moving onto another drawing. As the drawing is black and white I thought it would make good use as an experiment to see whether I could include video footage of a train that I took on my phone the week before. It’s a little wobbly as the footage changed perspectives as I panned across but black and white is more forgiving, and the strange mix of two and three dimensions – after the train disappears it turns back into a charcoal drawing .
Once I had found the right pastel paper, I decided to change the theme to portraits. I used the portrait sessions from Draw Brighton. With Adrian, I decided to pause while he was lying back setting himself up and playing around with the lamp rather than base the drawing on his planned pose. I wanted to see if I could catch him not posing and the angle he briefly had the lamp at created more contrast between him and the bed he was lying on.
With Charlie, I did bring in some lines as their expression needed them, and I couldn’t continue to blend without losing the definition of the scrunched up skin. I decided to spend less time on Charlie’s portrait to try and not lose a sense of movement, their head moving quickly towards the viewer – reacting to the viewer, in contrast to how I drew Adrian who looks like he’s alone thinking to himself.
I’ve created as much depth in the portraits as I could, this was definitely helped by using a tissue to sweep the charcoal into curves, toward the end of each drawing it became more difficult to add charcoal without taking it away.
How might you make work about the space between the surface and the implied three dimensions?
Incidentally, drawing portraits of people I have only seen on a screen in a way that implies I was physically next to them does make the two portraits about the space between reality (screen or surface) and three dimensions. This would most likely be the case too when making figurative and portrait drawings – I barely see anyone physically anymore, I’ve only met those I work with via video calls. Maybe this topic would be something to draw ideas from – it’s likely I wouldn’t recognise some of the people I see on the screen everyday if they were physically standing next to me as I only see them from a fixed angle, in a tiny box, via a blurry webcam. If this is true, it doesn’t make it any different in ‘digital life drawing’, you can’t truly see a person via a monitor. Being simultaneously in the company of others while being alone fits well with the idea of a drawing being three dimensional whilst also being completely flat.
Holly 516995 - Drawing 2: Investigating Drawing 