Creative Drawing - A day in the life of a fashion student

Last Thursday at university, my group mates and I spent the whole day in a drawing workshop (a long but very fun day.) To start with, I was dreading the day as six hours of drawing sounds draining, but kid you not it was one of my favourite days at university so far. I haven't spent hours drawing in a very long time, so spending the day doing this really helped me, as one of our units involves drawing and illustration work.

It wasn't just any type of drawing, it was mark making; using different types of pens and lines to create different marks. The first half of the session was trying this out with different pencils and then gradually getting to the stage where you'd explore with different types of media.

Pencil mark making

Watercolour mark making

Eventually, later on in the day, we experimented with line further, by doing continuous line drawing and blind drawing sketches. This way of drawing is my favourite way; the result you get is bizarre but also really cool and arty. I really enjoyed this exercise and hope to use this style of drawing a lot more.

                           

Lastly, for the last hour of the day, we were practising drawing hands, by far the hardest feature to draw on a human body. I've always avoided drawing hands as i'm reaallllyy not good at them. I've only ever drawn them if i've had to as i've never been good at them so this task was beneficial for me!                                                
 
             

Creative Drawing - Exhibition Review

'Lines of Thought - Drawing from Michelangelo to now'

Recently, I took a trip to Poole’s museum to see an exhibition, ‘Lines of Thought'. It consisted of famous artist’s drawings and a variation of drawing styles and techniques. The best thing about the whole trip was that it was a lovely day, the sun was shining (a rare moment in September for England), we went charity shop shopping, not to mention the free fish and chips our university provided us (yay!) and obviously the exhibition itself.

The exhibition within the museum was albeit small but very overwhelming – works from Pablo Picasso’s drawings flowed into Leonardo da Vinci, and then into Michelangelo, to name a few. Seeing drawings right there in front of me from these incredibly famous artists was mesmerising and insane to witness. All of the 70 drawings displayed offered a breath-taking range of styles and techniques, as well as the huge variation in dates, ranging from 400BC to the present day. I didn’t realise that there were so many different ways of drawing, but visiting this exhibition has really opened my eyes to the bigger picture!

The brush drawing in grey and black ink by A. R. Penck especially interested me as soon as I walked in; it caught my attention mainly because it’s such a bold piece and the thickness of the dots has allowed the features to become prominent. Penck has successful here in stealing the limelight from the other pieces. It was made in response to Andy Warhol’s claim that he wanted to paint like a machine, this is a pretty accurate response as it looks like something that has come out of a mechanical typewriter, thus aligning to Warhol's technique.

A.R. Penck - Untitled (Self Portrait), 1975

All of the artwork was inspiring, as every piece showed the artists individuality and characteristics. I could discuss this art exhibition in so much depth but unfortunately that would take up a lot of your time, as I have so much to say about it. However, if you’re in Poole or if you want to take a trip to an exhibition, I’d advise to go there!