Friday Drawing Sessions

I really enjoy the weekly Friday Drawing sessions. They allow me to leave behind my current project work for two hours and focus solely on exploring and improving my drawing skills, which is something that unfortunately, often gets left to the sidelines when focusing on my 'main' projects. Without realising it, I regularly find myself deeply absorbed in a task, and while that's not a bad thing, Friday Drawing has reminded me to loosen up sometimes and return to the basics. Making sure the foundations of drawing are solid is really important and I've already noticed how these weekly tasks have improved my work, for example, I have been much more illustrative with my design work, which I have then been developing digitally, rather than going straight to the computer to generate designs, which I might have been more inclined to do in the past. 

My first piece of work from Friday Drawing

As someone who is quite a tentative drawer, the first session really pushed me out of my comfort zone. We had to do blind drawings of random objects on the table in front of us, including chairs. At first I found this unnatural, but actually, by allowing my mind to dictate where my hand took the pencil, not my eyes, I created a drawing which I think has character and strong linear quality.

Blind drawing using different starting points

For another task we had to draw five spots on a sheet and, starting at the first spot, draw a person in front of us. We then had to repeat the drawing four more times, each time beginning the drawing from the next spot. This produced some interesting drawings, where it was difficult to decide where the positive and negative spaces were. Painting in some of the spaces helped define the image. 

Blind portrait

Having to stare at the person opposite and draw them, without looking at the paper was quite unnerving. However I think this is one of my favourite drawings from the sessions, because while it has an unrefined, childish quality, it still has some details which make the pink lines obviously a person. I also like the way the drawings underneath come through. 

Mixing colours

Mixing colours is another fundamental component to successful drawing, and I enjoyed the 'mushy peas' task, despite finding it frustratingly hard to create a good, flat colour with the gouache, which, when properly mixed and applied, gives a really bold and vibrant colour. It was interesting to see how people from different parts of the country interpreted the colour 'mushy peas'.

Collage, cutting, text, oblique strategies

Collage is one of my favourite means of drawing, and I found these tasks really good as they were restraining but also required you to think outside of the box. For the piece we did with the instruction, 'text', I took one of my drawings from the first week, which I felt looked like someone's mind, full of tangled thoughts, and added text around the outside. Then for the oblique strategy, I had to 'cut a vital connection'. I found this hard to interpret so went with the first thing which came to mind; cutting the paper in half. However, I think this strategy could be explored more interestingly. 

Found layouts and kinder egg composition

Finding layouts to inspire interesting compositions was really challenging, especially for the layouts, 'golden ratio' and 'rule of thirds'. I found I needed to look all around me when taking photos; above, below, around corners, inside drawers and bags, in order to find interesting layouts. When combining this with a kinder egg it became even more unusual. It took me a good fifteen minutes of rearranging to come up with a composition which reflected my layouts.

Overall, my favourite thing about Friday drawing has been seeing how everyone interprets the same instructions differently, as each week there are so many interesting ideas and pieces of work from each person in the group. I feel much more inspired and open-minded about drawing having had these sessions.