Drawing Day at West Dean

I am half way through a Foundation Diploma course at West Dean https://www.westdean.org.uk/CollegeChannel/ShortCourses/FoundationDiplomainArtDesign.aspx. As part of the Diploma, students are invited to attend "Drawing Days" - a useful way to spend time with other students, catch up with the tutors, have a tutorial and spend time in this lovely place. I attended my second day last week.  I was more relaxed this time, having less on mind and knowing, to a degree, what to expect.

We were asked to consider structure in drawing, composition and particularly the potential of zooming in to part of the subject - in this case architectural plants. 

I chose a plant because I became fascinated with the negative spaces between the leaves and first drew a small thumbnail of the spaces in a selected part and then repeated it by drawing the leaves themselves.  It is interesting how different, yet similar, these are. I prefer the second of the drawings - it seems more balanced as a design.

I then drew a larger drawing of a segment, really enjoying pushing the charcoal around, and found myself responding to the shapes of the leaves etc.  The feedback on this was that it might be more effective if the darks, or some of them at least, were darker.  I will carry on working on this and recording the changes.

 The plant was very colourful, with a yellow and red bract so I decided on collage for my next piece.  I only had a small pack of materials with me - magazine pictures and photocopies of some of my own pictures so was limited in choice but this was useful as I had to make do and be more creative with my response.  I drew the plant on top of the collage in black felt tip to emphasise the shape.

Later when I was uploading photographs of this, I accidentally zoomed onto a part of it and was surprised by the result. It has potential for further development - perhaps into print.

The next two pieces of work developed on from the collage - first drawing the basic shapes and adding some grey tones - and then just looking at the negative shapes

 I have found myself developing drawings more and more recently.  This is a direct result of the Creative Development weekend in December at West Dean for Diploma students where we were introduced to the idea of a "body of work".  I can see more potential in the collage and drawings developed from it and intend to work on the ideas generated.

After lunch I had a look at another plant - a succulent with a stem of very small flowers.  I enlarged them, trying to identify the structure - finding this difficult without a magnifying glass and then used these drawings as a basis to draw larger and then larger still in light sienna and black drawing inks.

This a great day - I was surprised how much I achieved. I feel all the drawings have potential for - by developing the ideas in the drawings but also in cropping them and looking at enlarged segments for development