Project three: Picking and portraying: 1.8: Portraying by drawing

Having thought about the media and techniques I have used so far, I have decided on the drawing techniques I would like to explore further:

Taking rubbings - I like the surprise of the unexpected results. You can't always tell with the eye what the surface will look like in a rubbing and the texture it will produce.
Using Inktense colour blocks - wet or dry - opportunities for blending colours and gaining surprising and interesting results.
Collage - I liked the process of observing more simple shapes and trying to capture their essence
Drawing detail but on a large scale - using graphite sticks - continuous line or repeated line markings - such as for my leaf fabric in Tropical Tourist.
Printing - develop my own prints - use rubber or foam, use other objects for printing with, around, on top of.
Digital drawing on my smartphone - having been inspired by David Hockney's iPad and iPhone drawings I have decided I to try it myself.

Having thought about the composition of this project, I decided that a simple glass vase with stems cut from the garden shrub was something that other artists came back to time and time again.

My research into other artists' use of flowers and plants as inspiration, specifically David Hockney and Vincent van Gogh reminded me that often simplicity can be better than a complicated composition:

Large scale drawings with graphite sticks

Below are some large scale drawings where I have tried to capture my composition in a few different ways, from the overall shape of the stems in the vase, to individual leaves and the veins visible on them, to a more detailed view of the foliage and berries at the end of the stem:

Using Inktense colour blocks

Collage

Using the papers created with my Inktense colour sticks, I decided to create some paper collages in an effort to capture the forms and colours of the plant, focusing on the foliage and berries, as I found the way the deep red and green colours fused into each other to be particularly interesting.

I also particularly liked the way the berries peeked out from underneath mainly red leaves was appealing to me.

Drawing with Inktense pencils

While observing the petals and leaves for the above drawings, it occurred to me that there may be other ways of capturing the gradations of colour from deep pinky red to green, as seemed to be present in many of the subjects I had chosen for this exercise. Here my intention was to use the ability of the coloured pencils to blend and create new colours. So first I tried them in their dry state to capture the dark green glossy leaf of my orchid:

This I left sent a way towards capturing some of the complexity of the colours, but I wanted to see if I could go further in getting some of the glossiness of the leaf down on paper by painting over the pencil crayons:

I think this more successfully captures the contrast created by the glossy surface of the leaf. I would like to explore this further by using shiny papers in a collage. I think this could be achieve with either glossy magazine papers, or papers painted with acrylic paints perhaps.

I carried on using the Inktense pencils in order to try to capture the delicacy of the orchid petals, first of all concentrating on the outlines of the petals, the way they overlap, and their delicate hue:

These drawings also used the texture of the A5 paper for acrylics that to add interest to the simple drawings in colour pencils, then painted over with water. Next I found myself drawn to the veins found on each petal, as well as the more saturated colours found at the centre of the flower;

Digital drawing

I was particularly interested in the possibility of capturing the translucent qualities of petals and leaves of the basil plants and flowering orchid on my kitchen window sill.

Here I experiment with different styles of brush and pen within the Sketch app on my Android smart phone to see whether I can created the effect I am looking for:

This was very much a learning process, as I found that by holding my fingertip to the surface of the phone and drawing continuously I could make the colour solid and uniform in opacity, but that as soon as I lifted my finger and started again, this would make a new area of colour that increased the opacity.

Having saved the above image in case what I was doing next didn't work, I then resaved and made changes, in order to capture more of the detail, by changing shade of pink and using a finer line to capture the veins on the orchid's petals:

Here I tried, with limited success, to capture the area at the edge of the petal, where it becomes even more translucent:

After finishing this drawing, I made the colours slightly brighter and resaved a new version:

Here I applied the same techniques to the basil plant:

I then revisited the other plant that I had drawn and based some collages on, in order to try this new technique. This drawing was made using the laptop-based program Paint. I think the Sketch app gives a higher quality image, as the Paint image looks rather pixellated, but with Paint it seems to be easier and quicker to fill areas with one colour:

This is definitely a technique I will use again, having initially been a little worried that I wouldn't like the results or that my drawing skills would not be good enough to work in this way. I like the opportunities it provides for saving versions, being able to undo something you are not happy with, and altering colours after completing the drawing.

Printing

Having looked closely at the shape of the orchid petal, I realised that the five petals on each flower were made up of two different shapes only, so I decided that I could recreate this by making my own stamps from craft foam and corrugated cardboard, and using premixed poster paints in pink, lilac and white, in order to try to capture the trailing and overlapping nature of the flowers I had observed and the different opacities of colour I found there:

An unexpected (and fortuitous) result of this result was the way certain areas of the petals did not print, or the paint pooled in other areas, created a vein-like effect. The ways the orchids I observed cascaded horizontally down the plant inspired me to printing in this horizontal direction, perhaps influenced also by the diagonal repeats found in many of William Morris's wallpaper designs.

Here I tried to develop the overlaps further and create more of a visible repeat but also experimented with the amount of paint on my stamp each time, to see what the effects of reprinting a second or third time before reloading would be:

I am quite pleased with the results of these explorations, but wonder whether I should have drawn the orchid plant and the bowl it is planted in as a whole as part of this exercise? I also feel I could do more to explore the texture and opacity of the leaves and petals of the plants I have chosen to draw here, in particular the way the petals of the orchid hang, overlap and seem to rotate around the central stem.

Later I returned to my other shrub, and wondered if I would be able to recreate the glossy shine of the spherical berries found on the branch by using a similar sponge tool to the one I used to evoke the beads of the necklace in Tropical Tourist. So I cut my own sponge printing tool from a kitchen sponge and tried printing with white ink onto black paper: