Sketchbooks: Development

During the studio session on sketchbooks we were also given the brief to begin a visual investigation into a given theme.
Out of those that we were offered and chose tropical rainforests and indigenous tribes. This was due to the wide range of challenging subjects it would offer such as human form, animals, wildlife and vegetation. Furthermore I already have an interest within the subject area and would like to expand upon my knowledge and understanding of it it visually.

Although I produced a lot of work for the brief, which only required 4 pages of work in one week, I was not happy with much of what I produced. This was due to, despite what was said in the presentation, being to concerned with trying to make good drawings. This ironically led me to make what I feel is some of my worst work due to being to restrictive and unadventurous with my drawing both in application and media use. 

For example here the choice of pencil combined with getting too locked into an image and trying to reproduce it on paper as led to the creation of stagnant and uninteresting drawings.

In particular I feel over embellishment and the clumsy application of graphite within this last drawing has made it both unpleasant and hard to read visually.

I feel my drawings have been more successful when a translation rather than simply reproduction has been evident. This was achieved through variation of marks and lines to describe form as well as not worrying about whether a drawing looks exactly life a photograph. Further more repeating the process of drawing an image in this case both broadened my understanding of the subject but also helped to my understanding of interpretation through drawing can alter and in some cases further an image. This is because you are free to alter form, composition, lighting etc. in a ways that isn't possible just through photographing a subject. 

With all this in mind I will make sure to worry less, experiment more both with media and application and in general be more free within my sketch books so as to hopefully create more varied and interesting work.