Chalk Pastels

In this session on the 8th October, we had the challenge of drawing an arrangement of bottles and had the chance to use chalk pastels which were new to me as I had never used them before. materials i used during this session were, a 2B pencil, chalk pastels, and cartridge paper. Techniques I used during this session include; times sketch,perspective, ellipse and positive and negative space. In this lesson I had learnt about ellipse, and using a grid method to create a perfect ellipse at the top of the bottles that we were drawing.

At the start of this session we were asked to do a timed sketch of the bottles, lasting for 3 minutes, 1 minute and 30 seconds. Unfortunately I don't have an picture of what I had done but I thought I did well under pressure and within the time limit. In all of my timed drawings I managed to include all the bottles and just about start the detailing. certain areas of my work that could have been improved would be the proportion of my drawings. I found that when we started with our 3 minute sketches I drew it quite big so didn't have much room for the other 2 timed drawings. So if in our next session we are asked to do timed sketches again I will always think about spacing on my page and to make sure that I always have enough space when I am drawing.

After this exercise we then went onto drawing the arrangement of bottles but we had to use purple sugar paper, which was new to me as I hadn't used it before or even drawn on it. After setting up, I decided to draw the outline of my bottles with pencil before using the pastels as I think I would be able to get my drawing a lot more accurate and be able to rub away any mistakes that I would make. Other people in the group didn't use pencil to map out the outline but I decided to do this first. Materials used for this activity were sugar paper and chalk pastels. Techniques I used during this session were perspective, ellipse and pos + neg space.

  


















Areas of my work I think worked well would be the accuracy of my drawings. I think that the scale and size of my drawings are very accurate and realistic.Even though it did take me most of the time we had for this excise just to draw the outline of the bottles, I wanted the shape of them to be as accurate as possible before using the chalk pastels as otherwise I wouldn't be happy with it as it wouldn't look good and it be drawn to the best of my ability. I also really like the way my chalk pastels shading has turned out. As it was my first time every using this material I think I used to correctly as it made my drawing look 3D.
Areas of my work I think could be improved would be the time frame in which i had to draw the image. I think I could work more on my time management as I used most of my time drawing the outline of the bottles so didn't have time to finish or add more detail and tone into my green bottle as much as I would have wanted to. Because I was pushed for time I felt like I had to try and use some of the chalk pastels on my work. This meant that I didn't manage to draw all of the bottles that were in the arrangement. So there was only a certain amount of detailing I could get into my whole drawing.

To extend my skills I would try and find an object/s at home or off the internet and practise this technique and to also find out the best ways of using this material to make it look effective and to the best of my ability.

Extension

As I said above I was going to either find and image off the internet or at home and research the best possible ways of using this material to make my drawings looks effective and realistic. So this is what I did. I decided to use an image of a peach as I thought my drawing would look really effective when using the chalk pastels with the different colours running through the peach.










This was the image I decided to use as it was clear and I thought it was good if I pushed myself as it was in 2 halves. I chose to draw the image first with a 2B pencil because it meant the overall shape and size of my drawing would be more accurate. After doing this I then went onto using the chalk pastels to show light and dark tones shown throughout the peach using different shades of orange and red. I found the stone in the middle of the peach quite hard to do as I couldn't make it look realistic like the actual printed out image. I didn't know how hard to press on with the black pastel, as I was weary about using it as I knew that it was hard to get black off an image! Overall I think my extension has shown that I've improved and that was the whole point of doing and extension, to show my progression with this material.