Scratchboard Eyes
Experimental Drawings
“Sparrows
in the Fall”
Colored
pencil and graphite on drawing paper.
The
idea for this piece stemmed from drawing prompt F. capturing the
spirit of a color or food. I wanted to try and capture the spirit of
my favorite time and place, which is during the Fall when the leaves
are the perfect color. I’ve never really used colored pencils other
than to color maps in high school so I thought this would be a fun
way to start. I also really love drawing birds so this seemed like a
good subject to try my hand at colored pencils. I started off with a
contour drawing in graphite and added color in layers starting with
the mid tones, then adding darks and lights. Improvements for this
would be to forgo the contour drawing and go straight into color. I
like the illustrative aesthetic that the black outlines give the
drawing but I feel that it isn’t working in the birds, particularly
the one perched on the branch.
“Coffeecolor
Parakeet”
For
this drawing I used coffee, brown water color paint, water color
paper, and a flat brush. My sister has a parakeet named Peepers, and
every morning when I’m drinking my coffee Peepers stares at me and
jumps around in his cage and bows up and down repeatedly. I enjoy
drawing birds and have been wanting to draw Peepers for a while now
so I decided to draw Peepers in coffee. Before starting this drawing
I thought that I could use pure coffee and build an image with
varying values. However upon trying the draw with coffee I discovered
that the coffee didn’t make any dark marks. In order to make a
readable image I had to add brown water color to keep with the color
of the coffee. As far as meaning goes this drawing is just an
experiment with the non-traditional material of my favorite beverage
and using the coffee to paint my sister’s pet bird. An improvement
that can be made could be the use of color. Peepers is a green and
yellow parakeet with a blue beak, seeing how the color of these
paints might react when mixed with the brown coffee might be an
interesting experiment.
“Trypophobia”
Repetitive Marks on a Page for an hour
Ball
point pen on sketchbook paper
Initially
I was going to make uniform circles on a page for an hour. However
upon starting I felt that the growth of the piece reminded me of
bacterial cultures or some sort of spores and the uniformity didn’t
support this image I had in my mind. In this piece I see honeycombs,
pomegranate seeds, bubbles, bacterial growth, cobblestones, and mold
among other things found in nature. I wanted the growth of the
circles across the page to feel natural and fluid. I think that a
large version of this drawing would be really intriguing, especially
if the circles were to stay the same size they are now. It would be
very meticulous.
Trypophobia
is the fear of clustered circles or holes.
“Sand Paper Flowers”
Materials
used: acrylic paint diluted with water on sand paper.
The
process for this piece was very fluid and organic. I didn’t want to
plan out the drawing because I wanted the fluidity of the paint to
naturally move on the page and soften the image. I purchased
sandpaper recently for sanding primed canvas and I was curious as to
what a drawing or painting on sandpaper would be like. I really like
the idea of painting an image of something that’s typically thought
of as soft like a flower on something course and grainy like the
surface of the sand paper, it’s an interesting binary. This piece
can have a multitude of meanings. When thinking about sandpaper the
minds thinks rough, and flowers are delicate to put them together is
counter intuitive to what one would expect. It can be a metaphor for
how people are thought of by others. A diamond in the rough so to
speak. (CORNY). Improvements would be to keep going, to keep playing
with and experimenting with different grits of sand paper and
different paints.
“The
Sound of a Jet Engine”
Ballpoint
pen on card board.
To
me the sound of a jet engine is a swirling circular sound that spins
and vibrates. It’s a mechanic sound that’s also highly organic in
what I would imagine it’s visual flow to be. I tried to capture
this in a drawing. I didn’t want to draw a perfect spiral, to me
the sound of a jet engine has debris of sound intermixed with the
main sound so there’s visual debris drawn with the pen. The texture
of the card board interacted with the lines and makes them appear to
vibrate on the page. The sound of the pen drawing on the cardboard
while I was drawing was interesting in that it was similar to one of
the sounds found in the sound of a jet engine. An expanded version of
this piece would be better suited to the sound of a jet. The sound of
a jet engine is a large, booming sound so naturally I feel that the
drawing of the sound of a jet engine should also be large. I feel
like a large scale drawing also has the potential to be more gestural
than this small version furthering the attempt to capture a sound in
a drawing.
“Dissipation”
The materials used for this piece were rubbing alcohol and
sharpie. First I scribbled with different colored sharpies all over the surface
of the yupo paper. Then smoothed out the streaky marker lines with a cotton
swab soaked in rubbing alcohol. Once the alcohol has dried I applied a thin
coat of black India ink. While the black ink is still wet I dripped alcohol
onto the wet ink. The alcohol dissipates
the ink and creates a weird effect that I’ve never done before. The meaning of
this piece could be many things. It could be thought of as tearing away the
black layers to reveal the color of one’s true self underneath. Something
profoundly corny like that. I’d like to improve this piece by having the ink
dry with a pure and clean color underneath rather than the muddied look it
currently has.
“Decorating
the decorative”
Decorative art has always been of interest to me. The idea of
something existing simply for the sake of being nice to look at is an appealing
concept. However it has a shallow aspect to it that leaves something to be
desired. For this experimental drawing I wanted to play with the notion of decorating
something that’s already meant to be decorative. We often use flowers to
decorate things such as tables, ourselves, and tombstones. With the use of
patterned paper I’ve attempted to decorate the decorative. To adorn what is
used for adornment. The idea for this piece is experimental both conceptually
and physically. The play between acrylic paint, oil pastels, scrap paper, and
water color is something I’ve never done before and I’m interested in the play
between these various media.
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