We started off the week with another task where we drew each other on call, which was a very interesting experience! I have never felt so simultaneously comfortable in my own space and uncomfortable that everyone was watching me and drawing me. Perhaps under the pressure of time constraints and the pressure people were drawing me I was almost panic drawing. The first few of these drawings are quite messy when it comes to tonal shading and I believe over the course of the last four weeks I've gotten good at fine liner shading then lost it again immediately. Perhaps I need to return to looking at Alphonso Dunn and study his book a bit more. I have definitely found that over the last four weeks of drawing that fine liners and gel pens are definitely my preferred way to draw. I use a thicker gel pen for a majority of the line work and go in with the shading details later with a smaller fine liner, it seems to be a technique I am exploring more and more and perhaps need to refine. 

The three drawings above were done during the week when perhaps I was racking my brain out of doing urban sketching and perhaps should have lost the focus on the buildings behind particularly in the second one where I got a bit fascinated with the turret(?) in Carlisle city centre. I was also trying to refine how I was drawing people and also trying to use just pens or just a pen brush and not use a sketch underneath. I feel like these drawings feel a lot more fluid than my previous ones and there's a lot less stress behind them. I have always enjoyed drawing people and I still love drawing them, there is something fascinating about them and I wish sometimes that I could be a hovering ghost just observing people while they had no idea I was watching and drawing (is that? weird? I feel like that's weird. It's late) 

In comes Liv! My friend from America! We were just so happening to be doing continents apart homework together when I was as per usual stressing over work, so she offered to turn on her camera and much like the first task we did I drew her for a few hours as we sat and talked on call. Overall a very nice experience and I had some fun doing some gestured drawings of her. 

I still felt like my drawings were maybe a little too stiff and formal? So i tried loosening up some more and drawing Liv in various different poses as she moved to talk or think or whatever she happened to be doing while we were sat talking. I believe these are perhaps my most favourite drawings of the week as a compilation, perhaps because I've never thought of drawing my friend from America before and she rarely shows me her face in the first place so it was nice to be able to draw her. 

Some of the artists I've been looking at over the week mostly come from two books that I bought in preparation for urban sketching, which were: The Art of Urban Sketching by Gabriel Campanairo and Phil Dean's book and guide on Urban Drawing.

Paul Heaston is someone else I looked at he is an artist who I was interested in for the techniques he uses to draw. Similar to what I was doing, I used fine liners for a majority of my drawings with a bit of brush pen and ink and pens as a way to fill in black spots to create contrast. Paul Heaston has a very crisp and confident way of drawing which I wish I could too achieve. 

Phil Dean is similar to Phil Heaston however he is a lot more fluid in the way he lines and his lines are also a lot more dynamic in nature. Even though I did not go for using dip pens or brush pens as strongly for this part of the brief I still looked into the techniques he used. However I believe I lack confidence when it comes to using dip pens or brush pens and because of that I felt that any work using such tools would look a lot most lackluster than if I used fine liners. Perhaps I should have experimented more but I felt like a beginner or an amateur when it came to doing urban sketching in general so I perhaps stuck more to my comfort zone and instead focused on getting the techniques down. 

We were set to do urban sketching as our weekly task. I started the brief off by drawing the view from my back garden. It's just houses and an archway to the street which faces Rickerby park. It's not a particularly interesting view, but I did enjoy drawing the drainpipes, there's something particularly satisfying about them. 

Over the weekend I decided to take a nice long walk with two other fellow illustration students and draw some hecking buildings. I talked about buildings in a previous blog post, how usually I struggle with them and usually I hate drawing them because of their minute details and the constant need to think properly about perspective. However over the course of the weekend I started hating them less and less. The drawings I did weren't perfect of course, they were drawn out in the open and I think out of everything this was the hardest part of the brief. I did a lot of them by drawing it out first and working on minute details later at home, it was just so I could bear with the fact I was struggling so much with drawing in public and I wanted to present at least semi decent pieces of work by the end. 

The first two drawings I did while we were waiting for the third member of our party to show up, I did two drawings of Hotel Chocolat in the city centre of Carlisle. I wanted to capture the brightness of the day through watercolours however I don't believe I was very successful in capturing it in either drawing. The watercolours were a bit washed out and I messed up a lot of the shading in the second drawing, but for a quick two drawings I feel like it could have gone a lot worse. I also don't know why, perhaps the man sat on the bench just playing the accordion or the people outside bars and pubs sitting and drinking beer and the particularly nice weather that day. It just... felt very French

The next drawing I did was of that crescent shaped area near bar solo, apparently I have a thing for rooftops because I keep drawing them for some odd reason. This drawing took a lot less time than the rest only because half way through drawing it a very drunk man came up to the student next to us and started harassing him so before he moved onto us, we decided it was best to leave. Note: it was 2 o' clock in the afternoon when this happened. I don't know what it is about lockdown that's made people lose their minds but people have. Things have just gotten a bit weird around Carlisle I feel. I don't know how but it has. 

The second and final mask I made was another one of me, I decided to take it a bit more literally however and I also decided to challenge myself a bit and make it out of only shopping bags I had accumulated in my room. I kind of like paper shopping bags, there's just something about them that makes me want to put my head in it. Does my mask count as a helmet or a mask? It feels more like a weird helmet thing. I believe what I used was a mix of a Lush paper bag (it still had a bath bomb in it before I tore it to shreds) A Hobbycraft shopping bag from when I bought overpriced art supplies and a Waterstones bag where I bought overpriced books. I used the Waterstones bag and the Lush bag to make the hair, you can make out part of the designs of the bags in the hair. I of course drew on the fact, the glasses are made out of the handles of the bags and then there's me, going around wearing it and it's almost creepy somehow. 

I could make some long metaphors about it being about anonymity and it could be about me feeling shy and anxious all the time and putting a paper bag over my head to cover the fact I just want to curl in a ball and hide from the dangers of the world a high majority of time. Perhaps that is the point of this mask, to hide myself with my little mascot characters and pretending I'm bigger than I am. When I was mulling over what to create, part of me was tempted to create a mask which looked like every annoying anime character ever to mock the fact that most people just see me as another anime artist. Maybe I am. I do try and stand out in this world but everything has been done already and nothing feels unique anymore. 

This got deep real quick. 

This is the drawing I did of my bedroom. It took me about 5 hours to draw and it features my favourite angle of my room. I drew it from the edge of my bed so I could comfortably draw it from the lil corner of my room and get ink all over my bedsheets. :) I am fairly happy with how this piece came out, I'm usually way too impatient for drawing details but for this one I was feeling a little more enthusiastic about it and in the end I kind of enjoyed it. The piece itself isn't perfect, I felt like I had grown in confidence with drawing with ink over the week however I feel like I almost went backwards with my technique. The drawing feels more messy in general and I feel like perhaps I rushed doing the tones towards the end of the drawing. I do love adding lighting and shading to drawings, I think I've expressed it elsewhere how it's sort of been my recent fascination in depicting light, ink is a very interesting way to add dynamic lighting because of the way it works. I feel like through this brief I have discovered that I really do enjoy pen and inks, I mostly like to use fine liners mixed with a pen brush mostly because I've always found dip pens hard to use and I didn't have one on me on time to draw this piece. 

So for a lot of the work I did over the past week I have only really been looking at one artist in particular (other than the ones I've been seeing and observing during online lectures, of course) and that's Alphonso Dunn. It was just on a whim that I decided to buy his guide on drawing using pen and ink. Well I say that, but it was actually a lot more than that. In reality, he is an artist that got plagarised by the man who created Inktober (who, by the way, is a massive asshole. Do not support Inktober man, he likes to steal people's work under the pretence the credit all goes to him because he came up with the bland, same old prompts) 

I started a whole new sketchbook for this brief, that means I'm feeling particularly enthusiastic! I usualy work with ring binder A4 sketchbooks, i preferred the fact I could fold it over however I am enjoying working on A5 and working across two pages, there's something quite satisfying about going across both pages. 

So this post is going to be about the first week of work I've done based on the brief about ink drawing! I tried as many techniques as I could however about half way through the week I was more focused on the content I was producing than the techniques I was practicing. However I was thoroughly enjoying ink drawing over the past week, more than I thought I would. I felt a bit rusty drawing as over lockdown drawing never really came easily to me. I'm sure other people felt the same way, it was a common issue for artists and illustrators and designers alike. But this felt rather refreshing, it felt like I was just drawing for the sake of drawing for the first time in a long time. 

The first thing I felt like drawing was hands, of all things. I'm not sure why, the idea just suddenly came to me. Perhaps because I need to practice hands, they are something that I've always struggled with anatomy wise. I'm sure a lot of people have the struggle so I thought I'd hit two birds with one stone and practice both my hand anatomy and ink drawing. Most of this is done with either brush pens, felt pens, fine liners and bottled ink and brush. Sadly over the past week I haven't had time to go to the campus and buy or find my dip pens so I haven't used them yet. However I'm fairly happy with the work I've produced so far with the pens and brushes. You will probably notice throughout my sketchbook I like to write whatever pops into my head alongside my drawings. Most of the time I'm not even consciously doing it, it's just if I feel compelled to write something I will write it. None of the notes are deep or meaningful. Just ideas, most of the time. 

The next few drawings I did were mostly random photographs I found in my phone, just finding images that stood out to me. Some obviously more detailed than others. I particularly enjoyed drawing the window in my bedroom. I live in the attic room in a house I'm sharing with other students. It's actually a really spacious room despite the fairly low ceiling and during the day I get a lot of really nice natural lighting. The skylights face right onto my desk so really it's an ideal workspace for drawing! I was mostly focusing on capturing light and shadow as effectively as I could. I think for one of my first attempts of the year, it's not too bad. Obviously there is refining to do but there always is. I hadn't realised until later on in the week that the drawing I had done was relevant to the overall outcome of the brief. 

Sure, I'm fully aware my final drawing was far from perfect or well drawn. Sure, I could do better and it's really not that good and I can see my mistakes in it but for a first attempt in a long time at doing something out of my comfort zone, I was happy. I'm still happy with it. I probably should have stuck to one technique of using fine liners for the whole thing, the brush marks make things seem kind of messy but at the time I felt like it was the only way to convey the mossy rusty look the roofs looked. There were probably other ways I could have done it with mark making but at the time, I was probably tired. This drawing spanned over a day and a bit to produce, not that significant particularly. But I'm one of those impatient people who likes to get a drawing done as fast as possible, possibly why I prefer digital art over analogue. I lack patience, but I feel like at least this year has taught me how to be a little more patient. I feel slower rather than the fast pace I used to go about doing everything. The easy route no longer feels like an option to me. 

The final drawing I did for the week was one I've been trying to do for, several months now and that's record myself as the months go by. Sadly I only took two pictures of myself and that was about at the start of lockdown and the other was, well, today. I kind of wanted to record if I changed physically or if I viewed myself differently at the time. It's kind of weird because the me on the left I barely recognise, at the time I took that picture everything felt like it was the end of the world and I was having a hard time accepting my life had been stripped away from me for the time being. Maybe that drawing conveys it subconsciously, I was trying to draw myself honestly but even the drawing I don't recognise myself as myself whereas the one on the right just feels like regular old me. Fat, tired, me. The me on the left had a tiny amount of hope in her that things were going to get better. At the time, I felt like I would be stuck at home doing nothing for the next year and that I'd never go back to the life I had before. I remember it being such an exhausting feeling and I'm sure a lot of people out there had similar feelings. I don't remember much about the me from then, it was like I disassociated from myself to cope with things and I couldn't tell you much about what happened at the time.