Demonstration of technical and visual skills
Materials: I believe that I have experimented with a range of materials using different grade pencils, pastel, ink and charcoal. I feel though that I could have used a greater range with paper size as all my planning and preliminary work was in my sketch book. For future assignments, I will create preliminary work on a variety of sized papers and do some close up sketch to obtain a more detailed view of objects.
Techniques: I used a range of techniques learnt during the exercises to create the desired effects. Tonal blending by pushing and moving charcoal and pastel marks, hatched marks with ballpoint pen, varying lines with pencil.
Observational Skills: I believe my observation has improved since the start of the course and I am able to translate my observations of light and dark well with materials. When researching expressive marks following the expressive lines exercise, I was able to feel expression and feeling by looking into specific marks and strokes to try and imagine how the artist felt; whereas I wouldn’t have been able to analyse these components before.
Visual Awareness: In terms of my own work, my visual awareness is developing, but I struggle with proportions and putting my observations into drawings accurately. However, I feel that I am always scouting out shapes and forms on a daily basis, analysing how shadows lie around the object after doing some of the exercises. I will start using my sketchbook more to work on proportions as well as showing more of my observations.
Design and Compositional Skills: Overall, I think my compositional skills have developed well. In the later stage of this part and particularly during the planning of assignment 1, I have realised the importance of compositional planning and believe that sketching out the thumbnail plans are efficient in the pathway to a final design. I will be doing more research into positive and negative spaces to develop composition awareness.
Quality of outcome
Content: Part one has made me realise the scale of time needed to be put aside to work on my drawing as I feel that I haven’t created the expected amount of preliminary drawings building up to the final assignment. I did look into still life as a starting block for the assignment, creating a research point for myself. I think my reflections are basic; talking about how I feel and what to improve but these may need to go into more detail.
Application of Knowledge: I do feel that I am using the knowledge I had from before the course started and the gained skills from the exercises into use. The tone and shadow exercises were particularly helpful in building my skills for conveying shapes and forms with shadows and light areas.
Presentation of work in a coherent manner: I have organised work in a logical manner within my sketchbook and with labelled exercises; there is also a checklist of sketchbook and exercise work. This corresponds with my online learning log which I have organised to flow with a navigation bar too.
Discernment: As I have not created any assessed artwork since I was 16, I feel unclear on how my work will be critiqued and so I am very critical of my mistakes at this stage and feel that I have to show family members for alternative opinions. From this, I want to learn from my mistakes and particularly the mistakes made for this assignment which I will remember for future work.
Conceptualisation of thoughts/Communication of ideas: I don’t think I have put these skills to its full use; again, this comes back to my sketchbook as I should have been sketching daily ideas more often. I will now keep an A5 sketchbook with me to develop my ideas and create more visuals.
Demonstration of creativity
Imagination, Experimentation, Invention & Development of Personal Voice: I experimented with different materials during my preliminary planning for assignment 1, to see what worked well for portraying the dark shadows and what worked better with finer details. Imagination and invention came into play with my compositional thumbnails and choosing specific items to represent something about me was a development of personal voice. I think I need to experiment more in the future, with a variety of paper sizes, also look into over surfaces to draw on. Earlier in part 1, I really enjoyed using brown paper so I will invest in different colours for the next part of Drawing 1.
Content reflection
Research – I need to do more research and increase my background knowledge on artists and techniques as I have only used a limited number of hard copy references and do the majority of my research online. I am never sure on word count expectations with research so I tend to look at background information on an artist and then jump straight to anaylising the art work piece.
Critical thinking with Learning Log:
I have found myself rereading my previous posts on my learning log regularly to remind myself of previous mistakes and how to avoid them, this also helps me to see progress in my work as I feel that I am maybe too critical of myself and should look at positive parts more often. Once I have received feedback from my tutor, I feel that I will have a better understanding of what I did wrong and what I need to aim for.
Drawing 1 : Drawing Skills 