Session 1: The Art of Mark Making and Artist Selection

A few days ago we had our first official IFS session and for it, we conducted a visual studies lesson. I generally found this lesson to be quite fun and creative and allowed us to practice and work upon our drawing skills a bit more, which I especially found helpful.

Unfortunately, I woke up late and missed the first 20 minutes of this session. This meant I missed the warm up drawing exercises. To avoid this happening again, I plan to create a better alarm system that is harder to snooze, like placing my phone away from my bed so I have to get out of bed to turn it off and hopefully do not fall back asleep. Despite this, I ended up doing this small drawing task after the session had concluded, as I thought they were good exercises anyway and wanted to give them a go. Below is what my final result was, which shows my hand drawn in various positions, overlapping each other in both pencil and coloured fine liner. While this work is definitely not good, it stimulated my drawing and was nice and quick, making it more enjoyable.

After this, we were tasked to draw a line sketch of the shoes we were currently wearing. I was wearing my house slippers so I ended up using that as my subject. Again, with time limits being placed on these drawings I found them a lot more enjoyable than I usually find drawing, and felt more relaxed to just create the work that came into my mind rather than worry about it not being highly realistic or refined. I found that previous drawing tasks in Toolbox helped me a lot with finding this sense of relaxedness when drawing.

We were told by our tutor to focus on our mark marking and how we were drawing out lines in terms of the heaviness of them and how they were being placed. I used this advice and tried to deepen my lines around the top part of the drawing to symbolise the flap at the top of my slippers and create a more dimensional drawing.

We then had to add colour to our sketches. As my slippers themselves were grey and white, I decided to exaggerate the colouring of them and went in with some blue fine liner around the outline of the shoe, and the inside of the dots covering the shoe. I also went in with black and tried to recreate the fuzzy texture of my sock, but found that it looked more hairy than fuzzy, so next time I plan to try a different line method to get that fuzzy texture.

My work station from that morning

Next, we moved on to creating a digital version of what we had previously been doing. This was a really insightful task for me as I have recently begun experimenting with digital drawing in order to explore more drawing ideas outside of what is traditional and see if I connect with the style more. Toolbox was able to push me into experimenting more, and I have discovered I quite like digital drawing and the different tools I can use using drawing apps. However, I have never attempted to draw shoes before so this was still new for me. Using my tablet and stylus I drew the slippers again, adding colour as well. I didn’t end up liking this drawing as much as the other ones surprisingly, but that may have just been because of the angle I chose to draw my shoes at.

A previous digital drawing I have done in the last couple of weeks since Toolbox concluded – not a part of the IFS session, but I thought it would be interesting to document.
A previous digital drawing I have done in the last couple of weeks since Toolbox concluded – not a part of the IFS session, but I thought it would be interesting to document.
A previous digital drawing I have done in the last couple of weeks since Toolbox concluded – not a part of the IFS session, but I thought it would be interesting to document.

After this, we then had to comprise a still life out of any pair of shoes we owned and objects we found around us. I used a pair of heeled boots and some small fake plants that I placed inside of them. I kept this composition simple, as I prefer simplistic line drawings and was also conscious of the time and my tendency to draw quite slowly. I am not 100% happy with how the end result turned out as it looks quite plain and definitely think I can be more experimental with my choice of materials in the future, as for this I stuck to fine liner and pencil. The tutor similarly gave me this advice, saying I could be more complex with my still life overall composition which I agree with. For this piece of work, I also opted to use A3 paper rather than A4 which I think helped immensely in giving me more space to include details and get the proportions of the composition right.

Overall, I liked the structure of this session and the variations between the tasks, as I found this to be engaging and easy for me to follow along. It was fun to be creative and purely just focus on that with this visual studies class and get a closer feel for illustration, with the lesson also still linking into our artist inspirations as part of our SDS.

As part of the IFS unit, we were also tasked to visit some galleries and choose an artist to inspire our works for our future tasks. I opted to visit the Tate Modern and Tate Britain but found I preferred Tate Modern more, as I saw more contemporary and conceptual artworks that I find more interesting. From this visit, I narrowed down a list of artists and have now settled at Ed Ruscha. I have made some notes on him, his ideas, and his methods and materials, that I will soon use to hopefully create a conceptually driven design for a pair of shoes.

I chose Ruscha because of his varied use of material outside the traditional art realm, as well as his conceptual style in creating artworks to provoke the audience’s thoughts. I feel like through his artistry, I will be able to explore unconventional methods like using food to draw and paint, as well as methods I have explored previously and liked such as collage. The bold and eye catching nature of his works also appealed to me and his use and love of language also intrigued my inner analytical side. For the sneaker re-design project, I think I will be able to create something that both responds to Ruscha’s work, but also captures my own artistic ideologies surrounding conceptualism and simplicity.

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