Category: Workshop 01

07/02/23 – 08/02/23

Making of a final piece.

On Tuesday morning I started working on actually creating my final piece. To give myself a better idea of the marks that I’d make and the colours to include, I traced the collage I had made previously in pencil and used coloured pencils to lightly add some colour.

As I was working on my drawing, I was conscious of not making it too ‘illustrative’, so tried to not draw outlines too much, and instead used the side of the charcoal stick and pastel to add blocks of colour to add some blurred/washy details. I stuck to using a charcoal pencil for most of my lines because it allowed me to work more precisely and get my measurements right, and any thicker ones were created using willow charcoal. I intended to use colour quite sparingly, but as the drawing progressed I found myself adding more whenever I felt that an area needed something more- and to balance out the bright pink of the bus so that instead of only being drawn to that, the viewer would be encouraged to look across the page with an even flow of colour.

On Wednesday I started to work on the second half of my drawing – finishing up the forest/trees in the background, and adding the bus stop and road in the last third. I began working on the last third and added in some of my guidelines, however, I felt that It didn’t really fit with the rest of the images and kind of broke the flow that I had going in the first two sections. Because of this, I ended up cutting this last section off once I had completed the rest of the drawing, and I feel like this was the right choice because it just felt like a natural place to end, and the pink bus pole that was now at the end of the piece, balances well with the pink bus at the beginning of the piece.

Overall, I’m really happy with how my final piece came out. I think that it looks well-balanced and I was able to create a visual journey like I set out to do with the mixture of perspectives and images, as well as depict the journey of getting on and being on the bus.

Completed final piece (full drawing and two close-up images);

Full presentation of work;

06/02/22

Development of a final piece

At first, I struggled to come up with an idea for a final piece. I knew that I wanted to do a drawing of some sort as this is what I had focused a lot of my work on up to this point, creating a visual journey for the viewer and representing an actual journey.  I began by making a few notes of possible things that I could do and made a few smaller drawings to try and spark some inspiration. In my sketchbook, I stuck some pieces of a cardboard envelope which I then drew over top using charcoal, adding colour with some pastels and paint. I drew from some photos that I have been looking at throughout my project like forest scenes, bus routes and seats, and collaged them together to create that ‘visual journey’ (of having multiple things across the piece to look at) that I wanted to achieve.

Some more drawings using charcoal on a cardboard envelope. The first depicts a bus stop on Royal Avenue, and the second is a more expressionist drawing of some trees and bushes- trying to develop mark-making techniques. In the third, I drew the same bus stop as I did in the ‘big draw’ only using less detail and more straight marks using charcoal.

Doing these drawings helped me to think of a possible concept for a final piece, in which I would collage together a couple of images to draw that related to a bus journey. I had an unfolded paper bag that I wanted to draw on as I liked the mid-tone that it has, as well as the length of it because I would be able to create a bigger drawing that could include more images. I was thinking of adding some text to my piece to create more of an ‘immersive’ aspect to try and communicate more of a meaning, or describe some scenes that one would see on or from the bus, creating a bit of a narrative. I did a couple of sketches of potential compositions, looking at different collage elements or altering the shape of my page to make it more visually interesting, and drew a prototype of sorts on a piece of cardboard that I could refer back to.

After a while, I started to try and simplify my idea a little bit because I think I was trying to fit too much on the page and over-complicating my idea. I went back to thinking about how I could create a visual journey and make my piece more immersive and looked at some artists that I had noted earlier such as Sofia Mitsola, whose drawing ‘Cooperative Hunting I & II’ depicts a story of a Greek myth, and as your eye travels across the page the story continues. I was going between doing my drawing over 3 separate pages that could move about and change the narrative as that happened, or just keeping it on one page (which I decided on doing).

On my way home I took photos of the buses and bus stops in the city centre, as well as people waiting for buses, people on the bus, and views from outside the window. When I got home I printed these out and created a rough collage that I would draw from the next day.

03/02/23

Drypoint Printing

In today’s workshop, we were making some drypoint prints, which I was quite excited to do as I enjoyed the printmaking workshop that I attended last semester. For my design, I didn’t want to do anything too complicated or difficult to complete within the time we were given, so I traced a collage that I had done earlier in the semester because I really liked the lines of the map, and thought that it would make for an interesting print.

In the printmaking studio, I inked my plate up and removed any excess ink so that the lines I had etched into the plate were filled with ink. After that, I put my plate through the printing press, which transferred the image to a piece of paper which I had previously left to soak in the water bath. Once this was done, I set it off to dry. For my second print, I repeated the same process, only this time I used the chine-collé technique – in which I took some tissue paper and placed it glue-side-up on my plate so that when I put it through the printing press, the tissue paper stuck to the page and my image was printed overtop. I really like how both of my prints turned out as I think my linework came out well.

Finished prints;

02/02/23

Sculpture: Size & Material Matter

In today’s sculpture workshop, the aim was to experiment with scale and materials. For my sculpture, I wanted to continue my exploration into maps and create a big sprawling network because I thought that making a larger scale piece would work better with the topic I was looking at. I really like the work of Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas because of how they use materials to create forms, and so took inspiration from their work when brainstorming ideas. The sculpture idea that I settled on was a recreation of Belfast’s bus route map, as a lot of work that I have been looking at is British artists exploring the London Underground map, and I want to go more into my own relationship with journeys/routes I take on a daily basis. I thought that recreating the whole map might have been slightly ambitious, so I chose to focus on ‘my part’ of the map that covers the routes that I take and contains places of significance to me.

I brought some scrap fabric and string/thread with me to the workshop and used that to construct pieces that I would join together to make my network by wrapping thread around strips of fabric so that my sculpture would have a better structure. To attach the strands together I tied string around the cross-section of some, and others I stitched together to create corners. I used a shoelace to make a bow that I tied where I live to highlight it and used some thicker thread to tie smaller bows around any important places along this route (schools, houses, etc). After finishing the piece I realised that it’s a bit more flimsy than I wanted it to be, I feel like I could have made it a bit thicker, but I still think it works well.

Finished piece;

Pinned up;

31/01/23

Our task for today was to do a drawing that was bigger than ourselves. I chose to draw from a photo I had taken of a bus stop along my bus route because I thought the composition was quite nice and I could get some good lines & shapes from the background- which is what I wanted to focus on the most.

Full drawing;

30/01/23
Sketchbook spreads looking into ‘Journey’

Brainstorming pages;

Drawings and collages;