Visual Language: Choosing a Visual Subject

In todays session before we started our Visual Skills task we briefly spoke about how we will be experimenting with our photoshop skills in which we would be choosing one black and white image we created during the observational drawing session to work with digitally. We were advised to scan it in and then produce five different photoshop treatments of that image.

A word that I found interesting in which I was unaware of the definition was 'Iteration' which defines as the repetition of a process. This is an analogy we can use for our sketchbooks. The class and I discussed that when working in our sketchbooks we should read it as an iteration, each piece we create in it doesn't have to be a work of art, it doesn't have to be finished, we need to understand that drawing things as we think and scribbling down ideas which are unfinished is fine, the page doesn't have to come to an end, the idea can continue through out the sketchbook if that is the case.

When sitting through the presentation in this session I picked up some artists in which I would like to research further, these included Keith Negley and Yelena Bryksenkova. I find their work so fascinating - the use of colours and basic shapes - perhaps something I would like to include in my own practice?

In todays session we were introduced to another task which included choosing a visual subject from list that we had been given. The subjects consisted of:

• Pirates
• Robots and Technology
• Indigenous Tribes
• Fun Fairs and the Circus
• Classic Horror Movies
• Punk Ska and Northern Soul 
• Deep Sea Diving and the Coral reef
• Mythical beasts
• Trees, flowers, plants and leaves
• Mountains, volcanos and geology
• American wrestling 
• Sheds, Treehouse and Lodges

After we had chosen our subject we had to research it and look for good reference material. I first of all chose the subject of trees, flowers, plants and leaves and went to the library to collect my research.  However, after realising that I had done a lot of plant drawing I decided against this subject as we were advised that we should pick a subject that we think we wouldn't get bored of, as we were going to be studying the subject of 6 weeks. So then I decided to go for the Circus and fun fair theme as it was something different and it would most likely make me step out of my comfort zone as I was used to drawing and sketching natural forms.

In todays session I hadn't done much drawing due to the fact I had changed my subject, however with the use of the internet I came up with some rough drawings with inspiration from Pinterest and google. I began to look at different characteristics of clowns and freely drew a number of sketches which lead me to my first page of my sketchbook, the aim is to create six pages in total.