Drawing plants and flowers – Check and log

How will your experiments with negative space help your observational drawing in the future?

Observing the space around an object is important to help draw and position it accurately. Sometimes it helps me to just look at the shapes created by the the object and negative space, and simply draw those – each individual shape in relation to those around it.

What techniques did you use to ensure you drew your plants in proportion?

I’m not particularly aware of using any techniques in this respect. Have I missed something here? Clearly observing the relationships with other flowers and objects, and the negative space between helps (as above) as does stepping back to look at your picture from a distance.

How did you achieve an effect of three-dimensional space in your drawings?
I’m not convinced that I did this particularly well. However, things that help in this respect include the use of light, shadow and reflection, as well as ensuring flowers closer to the front of an arrangement are a little bolder and sharper. Also, including overlapping elements, e.g. leaves and flowers, rather than each component part sitting in its own space.

Exercise: Drawing with other coloured media

Drawn with a bamboo pen and red ink, and then painted with Brusho inks. Coloured pencil for detail on the lilies. Background oil pastel drawing with ink wash over.

The coloured pencil wasn’t very happy on top of the ink (surprising) and I had to use a lot of pressure to make any marks. I think it would be better to use the same mixed media combination in the background and object to pull the picture together.

 

 

Drawn with mainly white oil pastel very quickly – it was hard to see what I was doing but I kept going and the result is very free and loose, a bit wild even.

I then painted over using Brusho inks.

 

Using marker pen, I drew the same lily six times allowing the images to overlap. I then coloured it in. As I only have a few marker pens I put one colour on top of another to create more variety of tone and I was interested to see the different effects this created. Also, I noticed that I got a different end result depending the order in which I applied the colour. Even with the overlapping, using the marker pens has created a relatively neat and orderly picture because of the clean lines and flatness of the colours.

Then I added Brusho inks over the top of the background and some of the flowers. The uneven tone of the inks gives the whole picture a completely different look. At this point the paper was breaking down a bit because I’d gone one step too far with multiple layers of marker pen and very wet ink.

 

 

I’m not deeply in love with the lilies because I keep seeing windmills when I look at them, including the plastic kind on sticks in gardens. I considered drawing some other flowers for this exercise (and bought some) but in the end I stuck with the lilies and I’m glad I did because it has been a really useful exercise and given me a better understanding of how the same subject can take on different characteristics according to the media used. Also, the different media led me to draw in different ways, e.g. sweeping, loose marks with oil pastel and more controlled lines with the marker pens.

Another try: Ink painting with negative space pencil drawing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simple mostly negative space pencil drawing cut out and and pasted on top of an ink painting of the same flower. This is quite effective and has left me thinking about how to achieve the same in a single picture. I feel I would need to pull the foreground and background together by using at least some of the same kind of media across both. Still thinking.