Big Drawings with Messy Materials

Inspired by a drawing class on my course I've been experimenting drawing big, first in the class with charcoal and then at home with pastels. I've got hundreds... and I've never used them, I've got quite a few unopened boxes and also a huge pencil case full that my son gave my last year so I have been having a little play.

The drawing course was run by one of the fine art team and concentrated on bringing out shape and form rather then creating a accurate representation of the image we were drawing - We were asked to bring objects rather then photographs in to draw that was pertinent to our current project and I was a bit stuck as I was working of last years summer garden pictures so I took in a garden trowel and fork - not too bad a choice as it gave me quite a lot of shape and texture to work with.

We only used graphite and charcoal and were encouraged to draw BIG - it was an enjoyable and strangely liberating experience. I'd never used charcoal before and found it delightfully messy and really liked the results, the variant of texture and tones. And that was what made me go home and play with the pastels.. I got large pieces of paper and worked very openly and freely this time using the photographs I had for my current brief. I had to resort to wearing a pinny as it was so dusty but again I was pleased with the end products - they were fairly primitive but colourful and they felt quite 'textural'. I drew a selection of flowers using lots of large stokes and lots of colour - and then selected the one I like best and put it into Photoshop for a little bit of refinement and further playing.

I also put one of the monochrome trowel pictures in and played with various settings until I arrived at a simple but pleasing repeat pattern.

The sunflower pastel picture, I cleaned it up, taking out all the marks and muck and then simply overlaid it with a line drawing I had done just to give it a little bit more definition, I made this into a repeat pattern as well which worked well but I like it best as a stand alone piece.

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