Tuesday 14 March 2017

Studio Brief 2 - What is image making? FIELD TRIP



RAILWAY MUSEUM
The field trip was a great opportunity to practice all the elements we have learnt about across the year in visual language. The morning session, at the Railway Museum, enabled me to focus on quick studies, documenting my observations of form, shape and visual details. These were a great exercise in documenting key shapes, and considering how visual clues can infer absent elements. I am particularly pleased with the first drawing as I feel that the use of graphite marks to infer shapes worked well underneath line work to gesture the overall form of the train. 

While I don't think representational or accurate drawings are a strength of mine, I feel that I have learnt to apply methods of image making to infer form and details through gestural marks and lines. Working with graphite, pencil and chinagraph, I have been able to consider a hierarchy in line qualities, using heavier chinagraph marks to portray the details that characterise the subject matter. 



YORK PARK
Developing on the drawing skills we practiced in the morning session, I applied these to more sustained observations, considering compositional elements, omissions and drawing approaches. I think simplification was a key consideration across my drawings, considering which elements were necessary to portray the whole. Reducing information to basic forms and marks meant that I was able to gesture more complex forms through simplified imagery. The first park drawing demonstrates use of marks and lines to infer natural rock and tree forms, whilst using more figurative line work to reveal a person in the foreground and building in the background, introducing a sense of narrative. 

I feel that my second drawing, of abbey ruins, captures a real sense of the texture and tone of voice of the architecture, while not documenting it as a whole, rather focussing on the elements that characterise this. I think I had started this drawing with a more representational approach but altered this to take in more visual clues and gestural marks. On reflection, I think working with both detailed drawing and more reduced marks within a single picture area works to create hierarchy and value between components. Here, the darker tones work to draw attention to the opening in the abbey wall, while softer graphite marks document a wider context


REFLECTION
The field trip really encouraged me to practice approaches to image making within an observational task, forcing me to use these elements in a more inherent and organic way, rather than planning invented images around compositional features. To further enhance my consideration of image making approaches within my practice, I may look to carry out more observational drawings as starting points for my stylised developments as these have proved to encourage me to consider necessity over reality. 

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