The blue and turquoise seas of Pembrokeshire inspired me to get this ongoing piece of hand embroidery out again. Stitched on to a piece of fine cotton dyed with Pebeo setasilk dyes which also seem to work on cotton. Stitched area is approximately 20cm square.
I am back from a rejuvenating week in Ceredigion, staying in an Edwardian railway carriage, directly on the coastal path. Mixed weather, from glorious sunshine
to rain
to freezing fog
but with enough opportunities to gather some treasures from nature
and marvel at textures and colours
Three weeks in to the new term of the drawing course, and we have had the challenge to choose an object, divide our paper in to 4 sections ( whichever way we wished, but with straight lines only) and then draw our object using only line in one part, only tone in another, texture in the next and form in the last section. We could use any medium we wished, wet or dry, but the drawing had to be very large, on at least A1 size paper.
I chose a shell, blurry photo below
and the result is
Furthermost left was line, the top section was tone, the middle was texture and the lower right part was form. I got totally confused with form until I eventually realised that this had to be a combination of line and tone. i used 4 grades of pencil, and about 5 different sticks of charcoal, both willow and compressed.
I can see now how my brain deceived my eye in drawing the inner curves of the shell - drawn curving to the right at the topped, when they are clearly curving to the left. I need to write out the tutor’s mantras and recite them to myself at the beginning of each class:
- draw what you see, not what you know
- the light is your friend
- note down the light direction
- your object is sitting on something - what is it?
- a rubber is as important as a pencil or charcoal
Off to sharpen my pencils!
