Sketchbook: Drawing Textures (Module 4, Chapter 3)

Introduction

This was a bit of a break from the high concentration required for the first two chapters of this module; however I found the second activity in this chapter rather more difficult than I had anticipated at first, finding it a bit of a challenge to identify textures and secondly to draw them without going into too much detail.

Activity 4.3.1

Finding Textures in the house / making wax rubbings

I used newsprint paper for this activty as it's thin enough to make rubbings, but not overly prone to disintegrate. I went around the house and found things to make rubbings of (carpet, walls, floors etc) and filled two A3 sheets of paper:

Making Colour Washes

I didn't think it would be worthwhile laying colour washes on the newsprint paper so made rubbings on layout paper, each texture in three different shades - orange, green and blue:

Based around lines: wood decoration in hall rubbed vertically then horizontally, two types of bamboo mat:

Spots:

Other textures:

Then I colour washed each rubbing separately:

I cut out each rubbing:

Then made a collage using pieces of rubbings:

Then glued these down, making a couple of changes:

I edited the image using some colour filters:

Washed out blue

Bringing out the oranges

Greyscale

Activity 4.3.2

Looking for Textures

I went out and about in the garden looking for textures to work with and then set about drawing these. This was not as easy as I thought it would be, as the drawings were done from direct observation without any tones. I found it easier to work very quickly on these drawings almost without lifting the pencil from the paper and spending more time looking at the textures rather than the drawing:

Lichen: I found plenty of this in the garden but all the same variety. I made two drawings:

Shell. I found a really interesting shell on the beach last week that had some minute growth on it that looked like webbing. I put this through photo editing to enlarge this section of the shell.