Burgh Island Drawings

Burgh Island Digitally Altered. 

I wanted to play with colour more so thought altering a few drawings on photoshop would help inspire me. I really enjoy this drawing in red. I think it makes it much more atmospheric and communicates a better message (not that there is a message, but it’s much more tense and this lends to the negative space, allowing the viewer to read into it as they wish). 

19.03.2015

Painting

19.03.2015

Charcoal Tonal

I was wanting to build on the use of tone that I started at the start of my project. I chose charcoal because I like how loose it is. It’s been a while since I used it, and I had forgotten how heavy handed I am and how difficult that makes it to build up tone. I think the drawing started off quite well, and I could see some definite potential in it. I think I either need to work on a bigger (HUGE) scale for a drawing like this, or move closer to something so it doesn’t become so abstract. Also paint on charcoal is nice, but paintbrushes just bring loose charcoal off the page (this was really interesting, I can use it to highlight/change bits that go wrong?). 

19.03.2015

Videoing my drawing. 

I used this drawing as a warm up, and filmed myself making it. I think i was very aware I was being filmed, and as before with the drawing people, I found the pressure of making a ‘good’ drawing got to me. I think I need to learn to just be looser, and maybe take my own advice of ‘filling a sketchbook in a day’ to force me to be more experimental and loose. 

14.03.2015

Drawing with a sponge on a stick

I really enjoyed playing with media and would like to build on it more. I decided to get really experimental to help me loosen up a bit more, so taped a sponge to the end of stick. 

14.03.2015. 

Media Playing. 

I was feeling quite sleepy and longing the meditative feeling of getting lost in a drawing, so although this drawing is not accurate and massively descriptive, I feel that the concentration upon mark making has made up for it. 

14.03.2015

The Life Guard Hut

I drew the opposite side of the island as a ‘warm up’, I enjoy looking around the island and don’t want to ignore the beach as a whole. I was quite experimental with my mark making and enjoyed how fun this was to make. I tried to be descriptive of what I was drawing as I wanted to marks to be appropriate. The bit I feel works best are the rocks at the front. I really enjoy the mark making as an image by itself, but for this to work as a drawing overall I think it’ll have to be worked back into in the studio. Pushing things backwards and bringing things forward to give things more of a sense of depth.

14.03.2015

Circular Burgh Island. 

This was made at the end of the day, hence the drawing being quite loose and adventurous with media (I was very relaxed). 

14.03.2015

Horizontal Burgh Island

Similarly to before, I drew frames for my drawings to go into, to play with scale, as it forces me to play with layout and placing. 

14.03.2015

Vertical Burgh Island in Graphite (Small graphite stick).

09.03.2015

Mapping 01. 

I’d always wished to map the island and my journey around it. I used graphite to make quick drawings every 40 paces, eventually getting onto the island itself. 

I enjoy the concept and how the images come together very charismatically in this kind of layout. With a page turn this could be very interesting and maybe enigmatic. However, I think as time goes on (in the drawing) they become too loose and ‘unfinished’ making the image hard to read. I think I would like to build on this:

- draw on bigger paper

- more mark making and ‘finished’ images (see previous graphite drawing on Burgh Island). 

05.03.2015

Previous drawing edited digitally. 

03.05.2015

Burgh Island Drawing

I was still exploring the island and the beach at this point, and had headed around to the opposite side. I enjoy the angle of drawing from here but I felt it was quite detached from the island itself which is what I want to concentrate upon. 

05.03.2015

Media playing.

Building on what I’d done before, and wanting to mix up the media a bit more to build on the atmosphere, I decided to set up camp at the top of the mainland looking out to Burgh Island. This allowed me to play with media a lot more, especially wet media, as I hadn’t done this before. 

05.03.2015

05.03.2015

People on Burgh Island. 

This day was particularly sunny and nice, and it was the busiest I’d seen the beach at this point. I don’t think I realised how busy a spot it was, so found it interesting to draw the people on it. It was nice to understand how the area was used: not the way I expected. People tended to ‘run into each other’, and it was used as more of a communal congregative area than a day-trip place - people didn’t set up for the day, only passed through, occasionally stopping to chat.

26.02.2015

Burgh Island Panorama in gel pen, graphite.

I really wanted to try and get a sense of place and space in my drawings, to understand the full setting of the locale. A way of simply doing this to get the ball rolling for me, was to make a panorama drawing. These are 3 x A5 drawings made on separate pages and put together digitally. When drawing the separate images, I was thinking of them as individual drawings, hence the change in media, as I was picking media which I felt appropriate for what I was drawing. E.g. The gel pen mark for the heavy rocks on the island, the graphite rocks for something further away.