Category Archives: Assignment 2

I think my choice of materials was good. I made a few mistakes with the colours, the main one being the browns used at the bottom of the image, but overall I think the Inktense pencils have worked well. I managed to add a bit more contrast than my initial attempts with them on the last exercise of the course, but I still struggled a bit to get as much contrast as might be ideal. The pencils don’t keep their sharpness for very long at all and, with the rough paper used, I struggled to get defined lines, so the shadows were done using shading rather than hatching. One other flaw was having to wait after wetting the inks for them to dry before continuing, which meant the drawing took quite a number of days to complete which meant I had to work on it from a photograph some of the time, as well as from life.

I think the composition works well, although a simpler plant might have been a better idea as it is a mass of green and I didn’t have a great range of green pencils available to me to complete the drawing.

I also think I worked out how to do most of the textures / colours quite well before committing myself.

I think the weakest areas of the drawing are the colour mistake at the base of the image and the plant itself, as I struggled to get the contrast, different shades of green and definition in the flower petals. I am pleased with the way the rest of the image has worked out though.

This is the point I got to before moving house and having a lot of other things on, which is possibly not the best point to take a break!

I started out by deciding that my main subject would be a flowering cactus, which had interesting shaped body and flowers (though not my natural choice of colour – pink!). I also thought I’d go for placing it on a windowsill to sketch in both the foreground and the background view out of the window.

Picking my windowsill and cactus, I made some rough sketches to determine the best composition. Working with a number of objects, I played around with their placement to try to get a cohesive group of objects.

Having decided on a layout, I re-read the brief and picked up on the need for strong directional light. I had gone for a windowsill which had a nice background of a wall and tree, but where the objects wouldn’t get any direct light, so I then moved them to another location which got the sun, but unfortunately had a fairly boring background.

This is the final setup I arrived at:

After having a play with some of the textures/colours before I started, I started out sketching in the locations of the different objects, then started drawing in the negative space around the plant to get the background.

For all of the drawing, I sketched in the basic colours, brushed over them with water to change them to ink, then worked on top of this coloured background with dry pencils to build up more contrast / detail.

I used masking fluid to block out some white areas on the stone and on the shadows on the side of the window, although this didn’t work very well.

With the window image complete and the background done, I added the base colour to the plant and wood

Unfortunately, I went over the top on the brown colour at the bottom of the image, which doesn’t match the colouring of the rest of the window, but when it was ink, there is no going back!

You might also notice that I modified the plant pot, to change it to a single pot rather than a pot within a pot which looked a bit messy.

Finally the image was complete: