I got a lot out of this discussion with my tutor that I am very grateful for! I took a lot of notes and I am reflecting on the key areas below in subheadings for my clarity and ease of referring back:
Blogging to learn
Really positive feedback about the clarity and usage but I have been encouraged to think less about the assessors/readers and more about using it for myself in my journey. In other words I need more reflection and analysis as part of my learning process. This advice and the examples given by my tutor were a massive eye opener about how I can better use this blog to help me document my experience, ideas, challenges, experiments etc. I am certainly not used to working in this way given my very different studies and professional experience so far but I am quite excited about how this can help me open up my creativity. I have started writing the blog before during and after I do an exercise which I find useful to be able to jot down ideas and points as I go so I will continue to do that – and this very much links to my next point:
Take the lead in my own learning
I have realised that I very much following a traditional way of learning which is to follow closely the instructions as the end game rather than respecting and respond to the instructions but moving forward with a view to carving my own learning through experimentation and better understanding what motivates me, what challenges me, what I want to get out of my drawing while I do so. My tutor told me that this should be all about me, unlocking myself in relation to my drawing, experimenting and following the path I chose with it. This is both daunting and exciting at the same time and with that in mind, I will certainly endeavour to do so and hope this will help me really grow in my skills and understanding.
Experimentation
Linked to the above, this means really thinking about every drawing or mark I make as research and understanding and experimenting along my interests and desires for enhancing my skills. As I have approached exercises, I have a tendency to play it safe and respond to get the task done – as per my professional experience. Even from my previous course on Illustration, I have learned the importance of sketchbooks but even then I was using them to come up with a design. Now, I want to use them more independently to experiment and document and collect ideas as I go.
Some starting points on this for me are some of the key things that came out of the conversation that really resonated with me: emotion in mark-making and studying others’ marks and my immediate attraction to colour. I will brainstorm more on this and put aside a few different sketchbooks along these types of themes to explore with mark making as well as some Pinterest boards to capture things that inspire me online.
My drawing style
So I have a tendency to lean into drawing in a very careful way with a view to getting accuracy in what I draw. Apparently this means that I end up raising the bar when it comes to the techniques that come with drawing ie mistakes in perspective and tone are much more noticeable and therefore I need to really ensure I build these skills. This was interesting as while I was doing Part 1 I was definitely getting frustrated with some of the problems I was encountering and wondering why I couldn’t be more ‘expressive’ and less ‘exact’ as I tend to do. This made me question whether my desire for precision was limiting my creativity and expressiveness – I was encouraged to explore both ways as a way to understand myself and my drawing and what works best for me.
I liked the examples of how to think more about tone across a piece and not in my individual objects for example, and the sense of light direction and I need to consider better how to do tone between objects that appear in front of others – unlike my pepper that wraps around my orange…oops! Perspective is also something I struggled with in my final piece with a very weirdly shaped fireplace shovel and with some guidance, I really see now where I can check certain places to get better perspective and thus better realism.
When it comes to tone, I already expressed my concern about not being daring enough to really go for the tone and this is why I really went for it in my final assignment, also choosing a darker paper to work on and a larger scale. This really helped me and after speaking to my tutor I realise that I was intuitively trying to build layers of tone in this piece to get the effect I was really looking for. I now need to practice that more.
Using colour
My tutor commented that my immediate usage of colour when experimenting with emotion and mark-making was interesting and it made me think about why it is that I automatically did so. I believe I do associate colour very much with emotions and expression and I also enjoy beautiful colour combinations and vibrant colours. Since I clearly have a tendency and interest, I will aim to explore and understand colour and how I use it or how it can be used for the effects I want in my drawings.
Mark-making and emotion
My tutor explained a lot about how much emotion can be in mark-making and that studying others as well as understanding my own is another way to understand and learn about and enhance my own practice. This resonates a lot with me as I take emotion, emotional intelligence and emotional support very seriously in my life and with family and friends very seriously and the expression of that emotion through marks is extremely intriguing. I may not yet know what I want to do with my art practice but I am interested in understanding this emotional connection aspect more deeply and had already identified areas like art therapy, where art is used as an emotional support tool, as entry points I would like to explore at some point. For now, I see my mark making as quite careful and controlled. My tutor offered the kinder ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ which I willingly accept 🙂 but warned against trying to force too much mark making but explore and work with my tendencies so that my own artistic voice can emerge. I certainly enjoyed the mark making exercises in this course and in my previous one and I am excited about starting a sketchbook again solely for that purpose and also picking up from areas of mark-making that have excited me before e.g. collage. Some of my best illustration designs came from experimentation with collage so I have been encouraged to build on that.
My tutor also complemented me on some of the marks I had used to render the final assignment which I was pleased with and this made me realise how much I actually enjoyed being much more conscious about mark making to get the texture I wanted and how much the exercises had prepared me for that as I had never really done this so consciously before.
Jo's Illustration Learning Blog 