Brighton university assigned a couple of loose summer research projects to chew on in our sketchbooks.
Someone has to hold a gun to my head to get me to archive my work, but hopefully university will provide a bit of structure and boot me into doing it!
Some of the briefs I made an attempt to follow were:
1. People watching. I love going down to the sea with my notebook and sketching people I see. I need to start taking my notebook to different places, because I am finding that I’m getting people from only one real angle – behind! However, it is still really interesting and useful. I like trying to capture moving people.
“If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth story to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.”
Eugène Delacroix
This has been the quote around which I have pivoted most of my live drawings.
2. Intense / Minimal. You can see in my drawings of the church early on in the sketchbook I created two iterations. One was full of colours, layers and textures -and I tried to keep to bright hues to fill up the brain when you look at it. The next page on the spread is a single line drawing in which I have tried to reduce the building to its simplest shapes.
3. Shadow. I have drawn a couple of striking shadows / silhouettes, and where there is still a drawing, I have endeavoured to keep the silhouettes and more basic forms in mind to create really pleasing work. This can be seen on the life drawing of the sitting girl with long hair in a bun – I tried to isolate the shape of the hair and I really like how it turned out.
I’ve been able to use my passion for food in my art. There was a week where I was hungry all the time – and always endeavoured to make something interesting out of the leftovers in the fridge. For a few days I found inspiration in creating illustrations of food I was particularly proud of.
You know, I am beginning to think that I am some sort of statistical outlier for the amount of garlic I need to properly enjoy garlicky food. I have taken to grating a large clove onto hot toast before making it into a sandwich, even if I cook the filling with garlic too. What was that tweet about vanilla and garlic?
garlic is to cooking as vanilla extract is to baking in that the amount i add to my food is guided by reckless extravagance and utter disregard, verging on mild contempt, for the recipe as written
Twitter user @ haragoochie
I think I’m digressing.
We have been metaphorically hit over the head with a wine bottle by our WiFi installers, who took two and a half weeks to tell us our order was as good as nonexistent. I am blogging from a cafe, and it looks like it’ll be over a week before we get any chance of WiFi in the flat. My small consolation is that I feel very important and hipster blogging in a cafe. There was a guy in here looking at mysterious graphs on his laptop, and another clicking through images of chest x-rays and taking notes on a pad. I am uploading pictures of mushrooms.
SEASIDE ILLUSTRATION 