Production Principles – Location Drawing

For this rotation we visited the Tate Modern in order to draw our surroundings, in addition to doing specific exercises at home. These included drawing our hands, contour drawings of objects, drawing a face right side up then upside down, and making a three panel comic using a location drawing as the middle panel.

At home exercises

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Out of all the at home exercises, the face one was the most useful to me. Although hilariously unsuccessful, I can see how doing this exercise would greatly improve how I see shapes in faces rather than estimating how a face looks from my previous knowledge. With the contour drawings I had more trouble, since I prefer to draw with solid shapes and structures as guidelines underneath my final line work rather than using contours, although I can see the benefits of this technique.

Tate Modern exercises

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Most of these were done quite quickly as my drawing subjects were moving around, forcing me to focus only on the general shapes of people rather than the detail. I like this exercise and do it decently often, especially when learning to draw new things, although it doesn’t really ‘click’ with me. I find I’m much more successful when I can break down the forms in my own time using a basic ‘skeleton’ and shapes, so it was a bit frustrating to not be able to do that on site. However, I found this to be a successful exercise that I know will improve my drawing speed and ability to break down shapes quickly.

Three panel comic

I chose to draw a person drawing one of the cameras like I did and being unsatisfied with the result since the camera is a bit wonky.

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All in all, I found these exercises to be useful and will be taking the techniques I learnt forward in my future work. In particular, I found that drawing faces right side and upside down was the most effective for learning new skills. If I were to do this again, I think I’d practice drawing more faces upside down and possibly combining that with drawing on location so I have to create something very quickly, accelerating my ability to break down shapes in my mind.

Final Reflection:

Note: this is the same writing from my final production principles PDF.

I think the outcomes here are great and hilariously bad. The right side face has good proportions and I feel I was able to capture the general shapes of the face very well, although it is a bit stylized. In contrast, the upside down face looks completely, wildly different with the completely wrong proportions and face shapes, although it is funny to look at. For a first try at this exercise, it went well, though! If I were to do this again, I would draw several upside down faces to get a more accurate outcome.

Conceptually, my work for this rotation was all based upon the people and objects around me. This was exciting, especially for the gesture drawings at the Tate Modern, as I had to capture the people around me quickly, which allowed me to focus on their overall form and proportion rather than smaller details. Looking back, I feel I should have spent more time on the gestural drawings to allow me to capture more people with a greater diversity of poses and body types to improve my gesture drawing skills.

This process was all about breaking down people and objects into their basic shapes. I was able to do this well and build upon the skills I already had in this area, but there are several aspects I could improve upon – the upside down face exercise in particular. In future I need to do more of these exercises to improve my visual interpretation skills.