Visual Language: Look, Think and Draw on Location

Today I had my first Visual Language session drawing on location near to LCA and visiting a prosthetics exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute. I really faced my fears of observational drawing and gave it my best shot at attempting to capture people, landscapes, movement and static objects on display.

What worked well?

• I'm pleased with my ability to go outside my comfort zone drawing people and places on location.

• Using my iPad to capture an image and then draw from reference helped me tremendously to zoom in as much as possible and try to replicate that snapshot of movement.

• I brought along a wide range of drawing supplies from inks and brushes and graphite to charcoal sticks and fineliner pens. This spectrum of equipment allowed me to be playful in my approach to image making and drawing from life.

• I especially liked my simplistic drawing of a building with lots of cylinders attached, located inside the Leeds University campus. Reducing the shapes down to their simplest forms is something new for me and possible something I could explore more?

What could be improved?

• I've not done as much observational drawing as I would like, to be honest, and this is something I want to be able to get better at doing. Drawing from life is really important and even though I can barely see it may be interesting to draw what I can see? Which is blurry shapes and shadows. It wouldn't be accurate or representational in any way but could this be worth exploring? I must admit this is something I am very self conscious about and I have always strived to make my images as accurate as possible so that sighted people would accept them and be amazed at my ability to overcome my disability. Sharing what I can see is such a personal thing but could be worth investigating further with a future project?

• I need to stop 'overdoing' a drawing and take a step back, being happy with a thumbnail or quick 30 second sketch - rather than adding tonnes of details! I am on an illustration course, not Fine Art - and this is something I need to teach myself over the duration of the course.

Final Outcomes

Above is my final outcome from the 'Make a Mask of Yourself' project brief with my character, Happy Blind Strawberry, as the main focus. I styled myself to incorporate as many tones of blue as possible to help highlight the array of cooler tones found within the astral reflections of my UV glasses. As I was walking around Leeds with my peers, looking for somewhere to be photographed, I had the idea of visiting local shops and supermarkets to locate window displays of fruit and vegetables that I have come across a lot in both my local area and whilst in Leeds. As well as this, I also went inside the supermarkets to be photographed among the fruit aisles!

Compositionally, I tried a variety of angles but found that a central close-up was the most effective against a background of enlarged strawberries displayed in a shop window; leaving enough of the periphery, without cropping, so that the background image can be clearly seen and recognised helping to pull my theme together nicely. In contrast, the photographs taken inside shops and supermarkets were not as successful due to the lighting, the time of day / week (a lot of the fruit stock had been purchased by customers, leaving a less than desirable background of scarce shelves and boxes) and featuring shoppers themselves.

In reflection upon the first brief of my course, I have really enjoyed having the opportunity to get to grips with a simple brief that calls for quick image-making, process, development and fun elements without focussing too much on a perfect final outcome. I liked the personal angle of researching ways to represent yourself in a different form; whether that be through exaggerating features, identifying with an animal or object or highlighting personality traits. It has successfully introduced me to the process of blogging about my illustrative journey in addition to providing a social opportunity with fellow peers when photographing with our masks.

Testing and Development

I initially favoured my sensory portrait and amplified that concept further by using softer, coloured pencils to show less defined edges - as a closer representation to what I can see out of my small window of vision. I took a step further, again using the same medium, this time joining together the common lines and contours to redraw my face entirely in a semi-accurate way. After further exploration of other ideas I didn't continue with my original intention of a sensory mask, but this is a concept I would like to revisit at some point in the near future during a more in-depth brief that calls for a deeper understanding and use of visual language techniques.

Looking back at my foundation of original sketches, I was able to determine that the strawberry and Guide Dog Tami ideas were among my favourites. I enquired further with combining specific features of both, along with my own, to make it truly personal and played with line width and cross-hatched shading. Potential colours were considered too; the Strawberry Dog eventually being eliminated from consideration as I didn't think the colours teamed together well enough. 

In this stage of testing and developing, in preparation for my final outcome, I wanted to produce swatches of the media that was available to me in the studio. I chose a common colour and observed the mark-making, tone saturation, spread on the paper and drying time. In my small examples I tried different media to outline with including drawing ink, fineliner pens and markers. The drawing ink provided a much better coverage over each of the materials used and kept its original dark shade when completely dry.

I really had fun with the looseness of the Brusho powder when combining different shades together - and this influenced my final and chosen design; a happy Blind Strawberry with galactic UV glasses! The vibrance and blending of the colours reminded me of a nebula which ignited the idea. I find the elements within the strawberry convey me perfectly - vibrant, warm, fun, happy, someone who loves accessorising and sees the world differently to everyone else.

Here is a step-by-step guide to how I created my Blind Strawberry mask.

The process was relatively straight-forward, with no obstacles, and took around 2 and a half hours to complete (including drying time of the PVA glue, drawing ink and acrylic paints). The only element that needed rectifying was the nebula created by the Brusho. While it created a vibrant base, I wasn't entirely happy with how it turned out and it didn't evoke the image of a nebula as much as my test swatch did on my work sheet. This could be for a variety of reasons including the base material (paper absorbed the Brusho more successfully than cardboard), using different shades than the ones I originally chose in the test swatch, the scarlet shade being too prominent, not enough water sprayed onto the powder or not enough powder added. It looked too dry and the colours hadn't bled together as well I had hoped. 

I reworked the astral background with pastel-toned acrylic paints and a dry sponge to create more cloud-like shapes as seen in typical nebula imagery. When dry, I created a template from a piece of paper and used this to cut out a pair of UV glasses, finishing with white gel pen to add constellations and scattered stars. As a final touch, I added gold sequins to represent the seeds on the outside of a strawberry; adding some much-needed bling. Overall, I am extremely happy with how my mask turned out. It is fun, vibrant and unique!

Initial Ideas

When given the brief of making a mask of myself, the first thing I wanted to do was create a mind map to help identify the many ideas I had flowing around my mind! I found this more beneficial than if I were to jump right in with creating images without processing my initial thoughts and expanding upon them.

Elements I wanted to consider included the shape of the mask, the colour palette I would use and imagery I would feature - my favourite animal, exaggerated features, a blend of my Guide Dog and I or a representation of my visual impairment and what I can see, for example. With this handy template I was then able to sketch and explore some basic ideas I had from my own suggestions.

Here is the extent of my initial ideas and drawings. I developed and explored a whole range of ideas including the focus on my eyes - having a larger, more dominant eye, using one eye, many eyes and an eye-shaped mask - variations of my UV glasses to portray my vision, merging myself with a fox, blending elements of my Guide Dog Tami and I, using my nickname (Strawberry) as the foundation of a new set of ideas and a sensory drawing of myself.

After producing a good amount of sketches experimenting with basic shapes and marrying ideas from my mind map, I marked out some of the masks that I wanted to explore further in my media and materials experimentation.