Pet Stall framing experiment

I was digging through some old drawings the other day when I came across this discarded picture of a pet stall in Mitcham, south London, done about two summers ago. First, I coloured the drawing in on the photoshop and then was unfavourably comparing it to a drawing of a similar topic by the illustrator George Butler: 

IMAGE GOES HERE WHEN YOU GET A IT

I thought that despite there being a fair bit of detail in my drawing and also some decent character in there is something that doesn't work somehow and it has something to do with composition. The composition is essentially a horizontal rectangle, possibly not very interesting. Butler's has more of a diagonal feel to it. 

I decided to try and circumvent this by framing off certain parts of the drawing, to see if reducing the scope and changing the composition would help with how the drawing works. The ones I tried are below: 

1: This just takes the side left of the image, like we are looking through a doorway, or perhaps some other market stalls.

2: This cuts out the whole bottom and right and just leaves the stall sign. 

3: The two characters I like the most are the two stall hands watching the conversation from the left. 

4: This just focuses on the five central figures. 

I would say I like 1 and 3; they have a sense of quiet observation to them. 

Thoughts: 

1: Perhaps try to implement framing during live drawing

2: Have sketchbook pages with frames pre-drawn onto them? 

Colouring things in

One of the things I have been doing over the last few weeks is working with some old drawings and adding colour in with photoshop. I could try and put that in more poetic English but really that has been the extent of it. In the near future when we have a bit more time to experiment during the week I hope to try some stencil colour techniques and maybe even down the line some more advanced print techniques with screen printing etc. However, in the short-term this will have to do. 

This is a drawing from a while ago I did in Ronnie Scott's jazz club of some people leaning against the bar, talking (the bottom image): 

I played around a bit and came up with this: 

This ended up going into the centre-spread of my Jazz Drawings booklet!!

I was quite pleased with this image as I feel it doesn't intrude with the line in the drawing and gives a sense of scene and time of day - this emphasises the evening/night-time setting quite well I feel. 

The colours are very flat which may be something to consider in future. I would also say that there is a fair bit of Feliks Topolski in this usage of flat colour which he used to do with his screen prints - see below:

Felix Topolski, Westminster 1973

The other drawing I worked with was of my favourite cricketer Chris Gayle at a match I went to over the summer. This is even more brutally coloured than the first, although in defence it isn't inappropriate as the West Indies kit is a truly bold shade of maroon with lurid blue trimmings: 

Thoughts: 

1: Try some print techniques in future

2: Try scanning some hand-drawn colour (watercolour, crayon etc) to work with in photoshop to lessen the 'flatness' of the colour

3: Introduce some collage elements

4: Work manually with a lightbox and maybe some photocopies of drawings etc. 

Ciaran's review

As part of a class exercise the other Tuesday we had to pair up and interview each other about our proposals for our FMP - this is my friend and fellow survivor of Pitville 2010 Ciaran Finnegan's take on my project: 

Draw students, draw lecturers

I had some weeks at the start of this project before the first race meeting of the year, which is upon us this Friday. I have been determined to keep my sketching going and considered any opportunity to draw as good practice. This has meant drawing students and lecturers during class time. The drawings have thrown up the usual considerations when it comes to drawing in situ, as it were; time constraints, materials, trying not to be noticed (I have not been too bothered about this)

This drawing has mostly been about trying to capture a likeness (can you tell who the drawings are supposed to be of?!) This sort of drawing gives one a fair bit of time as the subjects are sitting down and generally listening, talking, or, in Jamie Tobin's case, cutting out his animal characters to give away at the Literature Festival. Actually I think the challenge with drawing in these cases is not to draw too much; to maintain a sense of spontaneity. This is something I intend to keep in mind as there is nothing worse than a drawing that is too finished/has too many lines and is therefore a dead drawing in my opinion. Ultimately there will be a balance to find in this respect. At the races I will be lucky if I get as much time to focus on individuals, however.

Nosferatu at the track

In a similar vein to my previous post, one of the things I did early on was to play around with one of the drawings I did of the racecourse and introduce an alien element - a drawing of a rather sinister-looking racegoer: 

He looks like Max Shreck from Nosferatu. I gave the scene a red sky. All very scary.

Soy Sauce disaster!

One of the first things I did for this project was get myself down to the racecourse on our first free Friday and do some drawing of the track. It is possible to walk all the way around the course which gives good views although you are looking through a three-metre perimeter fence the whole time.

Alas, this day was fated in more ways than one. First, I forgot my meticulously packed pencil case, packed with coloured pencils that I hoped would let me produce some David Hockney style magic. I luckily had my watercolours with me and a black pen. In the event this turned out to be fine and I think limiting the drawing materials available is not a bad idea in any case:

The last drawing is of a man walking his dog (no dog, it was too fast) and a jogger. They look like they are about to jump over the fences! 

I took a few things from this exercise: 

1: Don't launch straight into drawing a massive scene or something really difficult FIRST (I tried to draw the grandstand initially and got a bit bogged down)

2: It is good to focus on small elements or 'frame' landscape-style scenes if you can

3: The 'props' of the racecourse - see the jumps in the final drawing) are worth focusing on in themselves and might prove useful to give context and sense of 'place' to images in the future. 

Back to the fated bit. For some reason, I decided to carry a bottle of soy sauce in my bag the other day along with all my sketchbooks and pencils etc. Bad idea and this book suffered the most - it got saturated with the stuff, I had to wash my bag and everything, TOTAL DISASTER: 

FMP summer proposal

This was my original project proposal posted on my drawing blog on 22.05.2013. I've decided to remove it from there so it's going up here hopefully in entirety, to be used as a reference point from time to time. Actually not a lot has changed in my intentions, only more specific thinking has occurred. Here it is: 

FMP

Final Major Project Proposal

To produce a series of drawings at the Cheltenham Racecourse over the course of the racing calendar, to develop these drawings into finalised artwork/products and market them to a race going audience.

Summary

The main communications objectives of the project will be to amuse/engage the viewer through a recording/satirising of events, situations and characters on race days at Cheltenham racecourse.  The process will combine reportage and cartoon and the final work will be designed to appeal to those interested in the sport/activity as well as this type of illustration in general. The project will involve a large amount of research drawing at the racecourse and the structure of the racing calendar will provide regular dates to work towards and, when reaching the end of the project, present work to its intended audience.

Project Aims

Aim is to find and observe moments/themes/people to focus on (humorous, poignant etc) during the course of the day(s). The ‘reportage’ element will focus mainly on those elements aside from the main event of horse racing that make ‘a day at the races’ what it is; the crowds, characters, the happenings in the peripheral vision. This is not ‘horse art’ although horses may feature – in the parade ring, on the way back from race, in stables etc. The most likely focus given my interests (and, I hope also the audience) will be on the world within a world of people at the racecourse – punters, stewards, racecourse staff, bookies, jockeys, trainers, veterans, newcomers, ‘connections’ and so on. Observational humour, character based humour, background colour, using drawing.

This will require a deal of understanding events to make the best judgements as to what to focus upon and what to draw. E.g. the cartoons of Sue Macartney-Snape and Annie Tempest, who draw upon ‘country life’ existence to make specific humour applicable to a wider audience; Posy Simmonds’ critique of the middle classes. Or adopt the outsider approach – Ralph Steadman and the ‘real beasts’ at the Kentucky Derby. So I will need to know what to look for at the place reasonably well if I am to aim work (at least partially) at this audience. The tweed and corduroy brigade. The nervous jockeys and tight-strung trainers. The cocksure bookies and ruined punters. The lads and ladettes on ‘office days out’. The horrors of the Guinness Village. What makes the racing at Cheltenham different from other national meetings? Etc.

Structure, Organisation, Timeframe

I am keen to build structure into the project. Conversely, I can work efficiently and quickly under pressure. An advantage of this proposal is that it gives me regular calendar dates – the days of race meetings at Cheltenham, of which there are 16 during the period of study – around which to structure the project.  I can use these days as primary drawing/research gathering/drawing experimentation opportunities, and also as a way to regularly introduce new material and also assess the state of the project and the work. It will hopefully provide dates to work towards (and in between) regarding research, experimentation, preparatory drawing and planning etc. As the meetings are fairly evenly spaced (roughly, one in the late ‘teens of every month from October, with a day at either end of January and nothing in February) this should allow reasonable amounts of time for developing the work, identifying what is successful and also ‘dead-ends’. This should enable me to approach each new meeting with a better, or at least different, idea of what to look for and draw on the day. Also practical considerations can be explored – location, medium, sketchbook size, photos etc.

Thinking ahead, this might suggest the lead-up to February as an opportunity to try things out, research and explore, with February itself as a ‘decision making’ time as far as the final direction and product is concerned, and the remainder of the time executing this. Potentially, the main Festival event (March 11-14) could provide a climax for the work with all the previous project development building up to this point. This gives about 8-9 weeks until the project deadline to finalise the material. The final meeting of the year (proper) from April 16-17 might provide an opportunity to display the work in some form and possibly sell some as well, conditional upon…

Market Research/ audience identification:

Part of the project would be to do market research into the commercial application/viability of the work. A place to start doing this might be at the racecourse itself, where stalls selling race art are present at most of the meetings. Research will be required into this market and I would aim to meet some of the dealers and consult them regarding my work if possible. The aim would then be to investigate the possibility and desirability of aiming some or all of the work at this market/ the race-going audience, as well as those interested in reportage/satirical illustration work generally. There may be a chance to trial some of the work at some of the earlier meetings if the project has progressed to a suitable stage by then. The final meeting (April 16-17) might provide the best opportunity to aim the finalised work at, meaning that some of the material would have to be finished with the course deadline still a few weeks away. This might be good practice!

Visual language/ Aspects of production

The project would aim to make use of some of the strengths of my work as well as address some conflicts/decisions within it; i.e. the balance between representational drawing/reportage and a more humourous/satirical approach. Also light/dark regarding content. The process itself may inform what decision I take on this, as well as research into both other pertinent practitioners – historical (e.g. Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Goya etc) 20^thC illustrators (e.g. Searle, Steadman, Paul Hogarth) and contemporary (e.g. Olivier Kugler, Lucinda Rogers) and the market as it is.

The artwork can build upon my previous work and its strengths – character, line, observation and humour. Reportage has formed the bulk of the work I have produced for the Authorship module in the last two years – a Scotland sketchbook, drawings around Cheltenham which I worked into postcard designs, a sketchbook blog (asmalldrawingblog.wordpress.com) featuring drawings from live music and other events as well as drawings from the racecourse (http://asmalldrawingblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/cheltenham-festival/ ). Some of the things I had begun to experiment with in 2^nd year projects including stencil and pattern work could prove useful especially regarding architecture as well as the number of ‘props’ on view at the racecourse – hats, scarves, coats, dresses, betting slips etc. My fluency in drawing these props as well as the environs of the racecourse will be important. Researching methods of drawing the surroundings quickly in reportage mode as well as coming up with solutions to this in the studio will be vital. Needless to say, some practice at drawing horses will also be essential:

Outcome

The final outcome of the project may be able to take advantage and use the experience gained through the market research periods of the project. This may be the key factor in determining whether the final work is designed for a particular ‘product’ or adaptable to different uses.  There may be one ‘product’ or several different ones produced. This decision does not have to be made at the beginning of the project. It may be that work could be produced at several different points during the project and decisions made later on the success or otherwise of this work. The aim could be to make works geared more towards an art market – i.e. sketchbooks of drawings, prints – or towards commercial application – such as race cards, calendars, yearbook, diaries, badges or stickers, small postcards/cards or prints etc.

Edgar Degas - Zwei Jockeys

Feliks Topolski - National Gallery

Toulouse-Lautrec

Paul Hogarth - Dublin children

Ronald Searle - Holiday Magazine

22.05.2013