Project - Making Marks

I found the initial exercises more difficult than I anticipated.  As a technical and scientific illustrator, I'm very familiar with working in fine detail and so was comfortable with making marks with drawing pens and pencils but much less comfortable with the messy stuff like charcoal.

It's the control-ability of the pens and pencils that I like. I find it much easier to build up tone using fine hatching than with charcoal. However this means that I have a tendency to work at a small scale. Working with charcoal forces me to work at a larger scale which was quite intimidating at first but I think doing more of it will be a useful learning experience.

Coloured Pencil Marks

Marks made with pen and ink, fine-liner pens and calligraphy pens

Exercise - Using Charcoal

 I think charcoal is great for working quickly and at a large scale. The range of tones and line thickness that can be produced from a single stick make it very flexible for sketching quickly and made me consider the tonal ranges in my subject.

Exercise - Line and other marks

 

RESEARCH POINT

I was aware of van Goghs skill with pen and ink drawings but closer inspection of some of his works made me appreciate the range of marks he made and how their use conveys different texture, tone and even distance within the image.  The drawing below seemed to be a perfect example.

Harvest Landscape - van Gogh

CHECK AND LOG

The way that I hold the pen or pencil has a big effect on the way I draw.  Fine pens and pencils held close to the tip encourage tighter more controlled marks to be made where as a larger piece of charcoal is good for larger more fluid strokes.
I can see that the softness of charcoal marks could be used to convey calm in a drawing and the finer 'scratchy' marks made by pen and ink could easily translate to an uncomfortable frenzy.
The addition of colour added another dimension to think about. It didn't really affect the marks that I made, but it did make me think about how different colours affect the tonal values.
I found the exercise with making lines and other marks in the squares to be the most interesting. I found myself thinking about different textures around me and what might be the most suitable medium for conveying those textures in a drawing.