An MA update:
More drawing on location. I think I am getting better, because I have actually produced a couple of drawings that I like. They’re not amazing, but I am getting back into the swing of drawing both people and the environment they inhabit – and not just as two separate drawings… actually that relates to the truly AWFUL drawing that I did last Monday at the train station. OK, I will include it…
Some people have said that they like this drawing, and I suppose there’s that one bit of railway ironwork that is quite likeable; the rest is truly hideous. I began by thinking ‘I must include the architecture’ (extreme perspective going on) but I just kept getting lost in all the white horizontal beams. And then annoyed and irritated. Time was running out and I hadn’t even begun drawing the people. So a few people sat down and I drew them! Hoorah, got some folk in before a chap came and stood directly in-between me and the people on the bench. When he’d gone and all my people had boarded the London train, I could see I’d drawn them in the wrong place. They should have been drawn lower down the page (they’d have appeared closer to the eye) and then they wouldn’t have taken up the entire platform.
Also, I have abandoned the POSCA pen that Hannah Webb employs because I can’t understand or seem to predict how it will interact with other pens used over the top. I don’t like it. I will go back to using pencil (see some of the other drawings below).
I like this sketch – it’s quite ‘graphic’ and I have used the white in a stylised way, but it has a soft and more integrated feel. The people look as if they belong, that they are not just an afterthought – or that the architecture has just been pencilled-in behind. I felt more comfortable drawing the people and the architecture. It didn’t feel like two separate drawings. It looks as if the people in the drawing were sitting like that, in that configuration; but of course my drawing is a record of the comings and goings of several people and not once were all those people actually arranged like that in one moment in time. The drawing is a record of the passing of time. I’m getting more confident at this, enjoying it more.
Music sessions at The Compasses – not exactly ‘waiting’ but too good an opportunity to draw. A couple at ACanteen (best cafe in Chelmsford).
And then this couple on the bus, on the way home from Cambridge last Wednesday. They were great and I’ve caught something of them in this sketch even if the proportions are a bit all over the shop. I was drawing on a bus after all! Using my familiar, semi-continuous line style that I know and love.
Job centre sketches – see separate post. I love the expression on the lad in the foreground of the trio (centre guy has a double face).
‘Lonely’ pic (entitled ‘shit drawing’). Done with Biro in a few minutes before leaving train station last Monday with my awful drawing and feeling totally despondent about my abilities!
Drawing in McDonald’s. Yes, there is a thin person in the queue.
I think this is the first drawing that I actually quite liked. It gave me hope.
Now it’s half term, so I expect the rest of my drawings this week will be of the boys…. hardly ‘waiting’, well – unless I call it ‘waiting to grow up’?
Natalie Eldred 