Sketch

Practicing to capture the emotion of eyes, as eyes are the organs that express the most emotions, random pictures from Internet are used.

Project 1

I decided to draw portraits for my first project, which is something I am more familiar with. I will be focusing on expressions and emotions, to start with, I will use photographs to draw some sketches of faces and expressions.

• use oil paint on canvas
• use photographs as reference
• figurative not abstract
• look at artist who does portraits
• draw sketches

faces

I decided to do  portraits for my new project,therefore I started to look at some painters, but I have not find any one I like as the ones I found were in a very abstract and weird style. I thought I would like to do some portraits in a neat and clear way using less colours and layers. In order to start with, I used some photos which I found online to draw faces as a practice.

Evaluation

As we were given the theme ‘Urban/ Habitation” at the beginning of the course, so I decided to make most of my workshop works relate to the theme. But compare to Urban I think I prefer the word Habitation, because Urban makes me think of busy, noisy, crowded etc which I do not like. Therefore I decided to make drawings more natural, quiet and peaceful then I thought of trees since I see them everyday, they are all around my neighborhood .

I did my first drawing of a tree in the Painting session, which I used oil and I found that it is more flow than acrylic, it is easier to blend the colours. And I feel more confortable to paint on the canvas since I always worry about the crease if I use papers. To make the drawing looks quiet and peaceful, instead of drawing lots of details I decided to keep only the silhouette of the tree. As it was a evening scene I used dark blue for the background, and I want people to focus on the tree not distract by the background so I kept it as simple as possible. I followed a photographer on Instagram who is called Larksnest, she has been taking a lot photographs of trees with a neat or white  background. I also did some research about the Chinese drawing of trees.

After I finish the oil painting I had been to the park which near my house to investigate the trees and took some photos. The first oil paint I did was a in a really simple style not much details, therefore I decided to use one of my photos to turn it into a painting which with a much complicated content. It took me a long time to paint, and still not finished compare to the first paint I found it was a bit too messy because there were lots of different colours and things in the background.

I really enjoy our print workshops, I did quite a few different etchings, and thought they work better with big block of colours which has high contrast rather than line drawings. But it took my most of the time to clean and ink the plate as it can only print once after inking, and I thought it would much easier if we only had to ink the parts we want instead rub the ink all over the plate. For my last print I tried to use two plates to create a print in our last workshop, I etched a figure of an angel and a cadge which I was inspired by the angel statue from Arnos Vale Cemetary.

Compare to the two above, sculpture was the most time consuming one. It has much more processes and always have to wait before I start the next step. Our first job was to make a head using clay which I thought was the most interesting part, I did not have any experience of modeling a head and I did not use a picture to refer to but the outcome was much better than what I expected. Then it took a long time to turn into a plaster mould, take out all the clay, clean the mould and chip off the plaster mould but when I finally got the finished head, it was broken. So I spent more time to fix it, it can be quite frustrated but I think it was not bad for the first time.

To be honest, I did not pay much attention to Moving image and Performance art, since I think they are not my thing, I would like to be more focused on drawing, painting and photography which I am more familiar with, but I also would like to learn new things such as  print making or ceramic . Further more, I am looking forward to do life drawings in the next term.