Exercise: A subjective drawing

Now having objectively drawn my tango shoes, it was time for a subjective drawing. Having free reign on what to draw though made it hard for me to decide on something! I finally took to the gorgeous ginger-haired highland cow thinking that there could be a lot of adjectives to describe it and thus give me a lot of options to demonstrate its quality in a subjective way, as required by the exercise.

I explored the my beautiful object (I should say subject!) through a spider diagram (shown below) of as many adjectives I could come up with that I subjectively found most descriptive.

Then I had to choose one to create an illustration where I exaggerated that quality. It was a toss-up between hairy and rugged…however I decided on rugged as it seemed more challenging and different to the very hairy images I found from illustrations online. So I first made a mood board first of the colours, textures and images that for me reflected rugged as per the below. Funny note: when you simply google ‘rugged’ and hit images, all you get are very handsome chiselled male models! So I started thinking about objects and landscapes that could reflect rugged. I collected many landscapes from Scotland which I think are just as rugged as its native cows, elderly people with rugged faces, other rugged and rocky landscapes and put it all on a rugged old piece of corrugated cardboard that my new little chair arrived all wrapped up in. I also tried out some drawings using charcoal and pastel, mimicking a lot of the colours I found – all very earthy and ‘damp’’ looking. Very Scottish indeed!

I then started exploring drawing the highland cow. I tried a range of set ups and then decided that it needed to be more ‘rugged looking’ in the lines too so I started trying out more angular lines, blocky representations of their fuzzy fringes, more straight lines and edges and really trying to break the form of the cow down into shapes and forms.

I then started playing with colour and different media, trying to find what could give a more rugged look. I ruled out watercolour, gouache and acrylic which I thought would be far too soft and started trying out full blocky edges of pastels, pencil pastels and oil pastels as well as oil paints. Playing around with this was lots of fun. I really liked the square edges of pastels and using sgraffito with oil pastels. However I also wanted to explore oils directly so I bought some tools to manipulate the oil into blocky and angular features as I found sgrafitto still too fine lined and the pastels not ‘dark and damp’ enough to help give that rugged atmospheric look. I really liked this look and the tools worked by taking away colour layers, like sgraffito but not as ‘cleanly’. However this was still trials on paper so getting this onto canvas was definitely going to be more challenging.

So I drew my angular cow onto an A3 canvas and then started out with a diluted greeny grey colour to fill the background so as not to leave any white and to already start dampening the look. I then applied a layer of lighter colours that really reflected the land and cow and already started giving atmosphere to the sky. At this point I tried the tools again but the paint was still too wet and it was taking off everything back to the grey/green backgound so I had to leave it a few days to dry out and then try again after a new layer of darker colours so I could ‘sgraffito’ away to leave highlights with silicon paintbrushes. This is a lot harder on canvas than paper and I really had to think about what strokes I was using. For the body I had to move from the bottom up so the strokes would come down over the ones underneath. For the fringe, which I wanted to make the most striking feature, I kept this very simple and angular and again started with the longer ones moving to the top shorter ones.

For the background and rock, I did a first round of colours and then used the silicon tools to take away to the next layer but it came out too delicate and not rugged enough. So I blended again all the paints and then tried it again with bigger silicon brushes and took bigger chunks and tried convey more rugged/angular features. I then did the same with the sky again to better match the adjective I was trying for.

I had a lot of fun doing this and learnt a lot about oil paints – which I have not used much at all. There is a part of me that thinks that I could have made it black and white to make it perhaps even more rugged and not distract from that with colour but I love the reddish brown and orangey colours so much and tried to reflect the Scottish heathery landscape in it that I finally opted for colour.

Final reflections:

Although I had to come up with the style and approach to this subjective drawing, I realised that because it didn’t have to be objective, I could really concentrate on being creative rather than trying to be so accurate as with the tango shoes. I have done a lot of art in school but it was more often than not more classic objective drawing. Without going through a design process of research and idea generation I would never have come to this style of cow at all. I started out rather nervous but actually really rather like the cow and the experience of being so creative!

I also think that because it was subjective, I could experiment even as I was painting the final piece – particularly with oils that take a while to dry so you can add more layers or take them away and retry so this was also a great medium in that sense also!