Sunday 2 December 2012

Experimental Thumbs Gone Wrong



As an artist, I’ve only really used pencil and charcoal never really done much with colour with other mediums apart from acrylic paints and the occasional pastels (which I really don’t enjoy using). I decided that this would be a great project to push it further. For this project I had got a hold of aqua tone colouring water pencils, Pastels, a brush pen, magic markers and a fine liner pen.

I started off drawing in pencil to begin with and tried to get a quick and sketchy look. My work speed is a problem as I tend to work very slow and so with this project; I had tried to really push my work speed more than usual, disregarding the quality to see how things went.
Things went okay to start with… and then came the unfamiliar mediums…
My thumbs started becoming a mess and I was not happy with them at all. I carried on trying not to be phased by it but things never got any easier. I one of the reasons was that I was rushing my work flow purposely to try and achieve creating something under a faster time in the hopes of improving over time. I also negated the use of an eraser and tried to work with my mistakes. Another thing was that I never really gave myself much time with each medium to get familiar with it.

I really didn’t like using charcoal on such a small scale. I’m so used to drawing large life drawing and still life pieces with it that it just felt so strange working on a little thumbnail with it. It’s definitely something I’ll have to improve with.

The Brush pen went terrible as well. I really like the flow of the pen as it just feels really nice to use. However I couldn’t really think of an effective way to get any quick, gestural drawings flowing. I would love to improve myself with this medium though as I really like the feel of how the pen works!

The magic marker wasn’t that bad really. I enjoyed them more than most other mediums I had tried out. I really enjoyed working over them with the fine liner pen. To me it achieved the sort of quick sketchy look that I was going after when I worked with them.
 
The pastels didn’t go very well, which was no surprise to me. I remember enjoying them a little more when I used them on sugar paper or some kind of paper with more teeth on them so I may try some on a different surface material. However I still usually use them on a larger scale rather than thumbnail sizes so I’ll have to practice and adjust.

The aqua tones water blending colours were pretty fun to use! I liked the flowyness of them when used with the water. Even though it didn’t achieve what I was after with this project, this medium is definitely something I will love to keep practicing in. The paper started to fall apart though when I started working too much into it so I have to be more careful!

Finally the Fine Liner Pen is a medium that I had stayed away from for a long time. I was never very good at creating lines that I could commit too and so I flowed naturally to the pencil. I needed to face it though and decided to go through doing mixed media working pen with the other mediums I experimented with. I definitely have to get those lines of confidences out so I think I’ll use pen much more often (I’m sorry pencil!). One thing I won’t be missing however is how quickly my pencils blunt.

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