I have created Dan the golden Labrador dog, and Dolly the black cat Sith. Dan was more of an exaggerated, almost caricature of what a dog looks like, as he resembles that of a cuboid, with dog-like features like a tail and ears made from newspaper, and half-cut toilet roll tubes for his stubby little legs. Smaller details like his eyes, were small little thumb pins that I pushed in, and painted over with the appropriate colours to look like brown eyes. I later decided to paint him a golden colour to resemble a golden Labrador, with a black line wrapping around him for his collar.


My other requested animal was a cat, and I decided to make my cat from a bottle, with similar assets to Dan; in the stubby legs from toilet roll tubes. Dolly however had a bubble wrap texture for her body, and other finer details like cardboard shapes I had cut out for her ears and eye shapes, pushed-in pin eyes, a pipe cleaner tail, and finally a fully black paint job with some accents of white and yellow to mimic a cat Sith's closely. 

In our third week, we have been given the task of utilising the media of paint. And further to add to our task, we have been given the choice of 2 watercolour artists and 2 acrylic (or oil) paint artists. I plan on choosing a majority of surfaces to work the paint onto such as bristol paper, cartridge paper, wood blocks, glass, a glass cup, and canvas'.   

My intentions with this segement of the course; is to produce various experimental pieces that it very outside of my comfort zone; and show that I have at least attempted certain techniques and methods that were/are commonly associated with the media. 

my tools that I happen to have on hand are several kinds of thick and thin brushes, a plastic paint pallette, 2 individual watercolour brush pens, and cardboard for some finer, makeshift details after they are done.

Today we were introduced to drawing with Conte-Crayon/Charcoal, and it was a very different approach to illustration than initially thought, as instead of holding it like a pencil; it is much more preferred to hold it as though it were like a stick of lead, and glide it along the paper with the intend of texturing first, and building on top of it afterwards.

After the session, I went out and looked for books and material online for drawing with charcoal. And ended up finding my first book simply being called; Life Drawing In Charcoal by Douglas Grahams. This book covered very similar ground as what I learned in my class session, but also had shown me how to find the right texturing techniques in casting shadow, and how to make skin feel believable to the viewer of the drawing. 

In also consulting books, I had also found a beginners guide to charcoal drawing book that featured Harry Potter on the front cover. This book had also shown the more mentally-mapped side of drawing rather than life drawing, yet I found it's advice and guide to have some interesting and helpful tips. Such as the use of hard and light strokes; for distances in the foreground and background respectively.

The very first thing we did when returning for second year; was become well versed into the basics of  life drawing. After the first session, I had looked into some books and material that could prove to be useful in further learning the fundamentals of life drawing, as there is no particular style to it, instead following a very strict and forward realism to drawing that must be followed.

With the Easel set up, we then would need hat being able to map out basic shapes first, with further detail coming later, would have to be the preferred method in approaching the sketch. This would be done with either HB or 2B pencils on an a3 sheet of cartridge paper, as the texture would be shown best on this type of paper.

I would say that for our first session, already I have became familiar with the setup for this type of drawing I had previously done, but shown a lot more to the intricacies of how it actually works. As well as finding out a lot about object mapping, texture, form, and understanding the human body's anatomy and dynamism with how they are posed. 

Lucinda Rogers' Piece -​​

Lucinda Rogers is a contemporary artist from the current era, and her work is very informed from Hogarth's work and other illustrators of his era. Rogers' piece is very similar to that of Paul Hogarth's as it shows a city street, with it's everyday life passing by. Though it seems very indicative of Hogarth's work, at first glance, it does have its own visual language and use of the media that takes what Hogarth's work introduced, and views it in another way to add her own flair in depicting a street-view building.

To begin, Rogers' work appears much more focused on detail and how those visuals are placed into the work, as a means to translate the real world onto a canvas, sketchbook, etc. Places where Rogers' work differs from Hogarth's work can be seen in the use of shading, this is often used in the world of illustration to block out integral shapes and add depth to the drawing. There is also the use of much thicker, blackened, lines of ink as seen on top of the far right's building, and the bottom right of the street to emulate the feeling of shadows and how it casts across the areas where the lineart sits. Another way that she approaches shading is with the bottom right's pavement and corner, and the start of where the cathedral lies on the pavement. It seems Rogers had used a much more free-flowing media to map out what elements would go where on the piece, with water colour paint, or perhaps in using dabbed ink through a makeshift brush. The windows are also coloured with a bright sky-blue, most likely to emulate a shine effect. while there are other varieties of windows spread across the building; in some linework being lighter than others. Personally speaking, I think that this works better in selective areas, as the bottom of the cathedral appears to have some structure, but not as clearly translated onto the drawing as the tower that is standing above it. On the other hand, this method actually shows some lines that are thicker to be well implemented, as when viewed in its entirety, you can see that some lines are not even there at all; for a purposely inconsistent, yet also creative way of showing where details are without visually laying it out and fully intending these textures to be viewed as though they were. This creates a very compelling pattern and keeps the attention of the viewer in my opinion.

And just like Hogarth's work, I can still see the implementation of line work that Hogarth's sketch also used, as the cathedral across the way from the main building collects a lot of simplistic line work that comes together to form the Gothic architecture from an age past. There is also the implementation of cars below, but this time, Rogers' had taken it upon themselves to depict a much more realistic and accurate attempt at illustrating the vehicles, even if they are more modern than the ones in the previous art. Another similarity I had found in Rogers' piece, was that she attempts to do the reverse effect of having the buildings from the background be less detailed, instead of Hogarth's opposite approach in detailing the background and lessening the finer parts as they progress into the foreground. However, there are still very detailed elements still kept in the background, as in the far right; we can see people walking through the street in the distance to where the vanishing point is. For being so far, I believe that Rogers' used a fine liner and ambitiously drew the people with body language so realistically, it looks almost as though we can see them in real life. This also goes for the people in the bottom left who are about to cross the street, as they are huddled together, which captures the sort of "rush hour" effect that street life houses.

To summarise and compare with a previous generation's attempt at the same format of capturing a street corner through the same media, I really think Rogers' work had shown some improvement and stylistic changes from Hogarth's that show through in many areas. ​

Ways in which I think this reflects on my own work, would be in how I have yet to master the methods of cross hatching, scaling and form. I would say my habits and concerns for my own work mainly lie in those aspects, while I apply texture far too early and don't map out where things should go first like how the aforementioned artists had done in their work above. I still think there is a lot to learn and apply to my skillset, as well as break out of a slight confidence issue in allowing my linework to be more freeflowing like that of most professional illustrators. I will commend myself for some perspective attempts though, as a lot of this course is teaching me things i haven't even heard of before, and I'm making it a habit to take notes and mentally burn these into my head so it becomes second nature. As for the use of ink, I would think I have a fair handling of how it works after going out and purchasing the tools needed to carry out these illustrations and similar tasks. ​