Workshop with Ben

For our workshop with Ben, The first half of the day was spent at the Plymouth Museum. We were given a few hours to walk around and make observational drawings in our sketchbooks.

I really enjoyed drawing the skulls that were on display there and decided to take a seat to draw a more detailed skull, the large Hippo skull. It was quite a difficult thing to draw but I really enjoyed it.

Any other items or objects that took my interested I also sketched down. Most drawings literally only had a few minutes or less on them. 

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When we all headed back to college, the next step was to pick one drawing that we liked the most to then use as our reference for the next tasks. The drawing I decided to pick was the raven skull. I was torn between picking the raven skull, human ribcage and lamp-post as these were the drawings I felt I did the best or would be more interesting to use.

 The first task was to make a college of our chosen object using sugar paper. Cutting small strange shapes was the main challenge here as many of the details in the skull are quite small and mostly depth based. Layering some pieces to create shadows worked really well I felt and was quite happy with the outcome. I also decided to use yellow paper for the skull against the brown and black paper to frame it more and create a more interesting look than just if it was simply the yellow skull on a one coloured background. Finished piece was about A5 sized. 


The next task was really interesting and completely new to me. I've never used a photocopier to make a combined image of multiple drawings. For this piece we were given three pieces of paper, and a square to mark out as our limited space.  Using a lightbox, we had to trace the square onto the other sheets of paper and then draw different effects/layers of our drawings. Thinking about if we wanted outlines, shading, backgrounds, text or any other details was a bit of a challenge because of thinking how they might overlap or have better/worse effects when run through the photocopier. All that was needed to draw with was a bold marker as the colour would be added when put through the copier.

(The pencil line of a feather can still be seen as I was unsure as to if I may want to add it in on a later date) 

My 3 different layers and the finished outcome. Each drawing was put through in the order above ( Left to right) with the colours of purple, green and blue. I really enjoyed this task as it was something completely new for me to try out.