Coursework, Part 57 Comments

Part 5 – personal project, sketches and ideas #1

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

There’s nothing like being given free rein for scattering any half-formed ideas to the winds. I’ve been thinking of basing my submission around four themed pieces employing styles found in Turner’s Fishermen on a Lee-shore, Klee’s Golden Fish, Hokusai’s Great Wave, and Hambling’s series of paintings of towering waves. I’d thought to copy those pieces in different media (soft pastel for the Turner, for instance) thereby introducing my own style, and bring in text that related to each period. Then I remembered a poem called The Steeplejack by Marianne Moore which, in its first verse, says: Dürer would have seen … Continue reading Part 5 – personal project, sketches and ideas #1

Coursework, Sketchbook1 Comment

Figure drawing atelier – volume

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

This section contains some exercises using cubic simplifications of bodies to get a feel of volume. For some reason, these just throw me in that I find the detachment from a whole figure confusing and unrelatable. I skipped those and went on to a copy of an actual figure, this one by Geoffrey Flack  (2015). Mine is in graphite pencil and again I found some success with the gridding. I’m particularly pleased with the angle of the head but oh that hand! I think I might resort to photographing the original and zooming in on-screen so I can actually see … Continue reading Figure drawing atelier – volume

Coursework, Sketchbook1 Comment

Figure Drawing Atelier

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

My second adventure with Juliette Aristides’ beautiful books. This one focuses, as the title suggests, on figure drawing and although I’m resisting life drawing where only nude models are available, I am prepared to work through this book as I did with the previous one in order to build skills. For my first trick, I seem to have drawn a naked Stormtrooper. Graphite pencil and putty rubber. This is probably my first moderately successful gridding effort. Usually, I find myself lost in the lines but this time I seem to have focused in on the right areas for the right … Continue reading Figure Drawing Atelier

Coursework, Part 4, Sketchbook2 Comments

Responding to Part 4 assignment feedback – liminalities and black-in-black

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Two key areas arising from tutor feedback for assignment four were the use of different blacks and the idea of liminals – edges or margins. A further area was an exploration of line in portraiture which I will address in another post. This one, I feel, takes priority because I can see how investigation might influence assignment five. I gridded a sheet of black A3 cartridge, added a further layer of black using gesso, and replicated the experimental cells so that I could apply different media on both a black and a white gesso surface. Gesso inevitably creates a bulk … Continue reading Responding to Part 4 assignment feedback – liminalities and black-in-black

Coursework, Part 5, Research & Reflection, Videos6 Comments

Part 5 – personal project preparatory work, digital seas

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Flamepainter for iPad is a free app and it’s wonderful for quick, if somewhat erratic, sketches. The process is easy to work out – choose a brush, set the size and other parameters, change the colour if you want to, draw. The last part is the trickiest as the ‘light’ zooms around the canvas as if possessed. Best plan is to try one combination of brush and speeds and get used to it before altering anything else! The image above is made on a black canvas using a number of brushes to pick out the light that might be from … Continue reading Part 5 – personal project preparatory work, digital seas

Coursework, Exhibitions & Books, Research & Reflection2 Comments

Book review: Beginning Drawing Atelier – an instructional sketchbook by Juliette Aristides

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

  This is a work book – guidelines, exercises, drawings to copy and a page next to each to do that. I have never copied other people’s work or tried for the photorealism some artists specialise in making so this was quite a challenge. Add to that the realisation not long ago that lefthanders make their marks in entirely the opposite direction to righthanders and I could see this was not going to be easy. Fortunately, the quality of the images to be copied – there are two da Vinci’s! – makes it clear that perfection is really not the … Continue reading Book review: Beginning Drawing Atelier – an instructional sketchbook by Juliette Aristides