Assignment 2 – A View from a Room.

Plan/layout.

For this assignment I decided on an interior to finish off this section. I was pleased with the aesthetic outcome of of my drawing of the stairwell taken in photographs with multiple viewpoints creating a distorted and disjointed feel to the drawing. I was keen to expand and develop this idea, so I decided to depict a panorama of my front room in a similar, multi perspective style taking pictures from the door way and making my way around the room clockwise, past my studio and back to the door. I planned to then super impose each selected image at different sizes to sway the depth and the angles of the various furniture and wall planes.

The stairwell piece was simpler to execute as I had the carpet, walls and banister to orient the drawing and make it legible despite the broken planes and perspective points. Not only was the front room more cluttered with detail, but I ended up using around 20 frames superimposed in contrast to the 7 for the stairwell piece. This would need a much more careful layout at the collaging stage to make sure the images flowed in a way that it was comprehensible as a front room.

I realised that if I could link up the same familiar objects, even at different view points, next to each other between the different layers I could span a reasonably literate script running 360 degrees through my front room.

For example the first 3 layers depict the door from 3 angles and the next one leads the view to the TV and bookshelf. The next one links the TV and bookshelf from a different perspective but leads further around the room to include the far wall and so on. The focal point in the middle is the painting on the wall which is doubled and linked to the next layer, the window. In turn this leads to the other wall and another picture, doubled and on towards the studio which then includes the original door.

This might be obvious to me because I know my front room and to another viewers it might look like a whirlwind has hit it, but hopefully I’ve positioned it in a way where the viewer can get an idea of the layout of the front room (if they can see the room at all!) I lined up the cross hatching with the perspective lines to help orientate the viewer and seperate the different layers.

I also used an opposite reflection symmetry from left to right, so the left hand side appears as a flipped reflection of the right, giving it a bit more movement as opposed to a straight composition, adding a little more dynamic to the drawing and giving the feel of your actual face physically rotating from the door, all the way around the room and back to the starting point, which is now at the opposite end of the page.

Colour/medium.

With so much detail and a need to keep the drawing clean and understandable because of the multiple view points I looked back at the previous exercises for a bit of inspiration.

The colour effect that first struck my mind was the multi media still life collage that I did. It was the bold colours that I wanted to create to give a story board, almost comic book feel to the drawing. Collaging it with different papers would have confused the image so I decided on water colour pencil to achieve the vivid colours for the background and I worked in the shading with coloured biro. the hues seem to shine through when layering biro, for the walls I used a wash of yellow water colour layered with orange biro, deepened with brown biro, similar to a sketch I did in my sketchbook of a bottle and cup done in the same colours. For the floor I chose purple/grey and the furniture ocre/brown. Using this simplified colour scheme helped to make more sense for the viewer of what was up and what was down.

The influences I took to the drawing was defiantly Hockney’s photo collages. Antony Green’s multi perspective views, as well as his almost child like simple colours, twisting it with a sense of Rorik Smith’s level bending perspective, I decided to cut it up into 3 separate frames to add to the disjointed feel of the picture.

Critique.

I was happy with the idea, medium and construction of the drawing, but not to happy with the execution of it. Although the structure was sound, I felt a bit apprehensive when adding the colour and texture which shows in the final piece. The flow isn’t confident which is exactly how I felt when I was drawing it, but hindsight is a great tool. I did like working in this medium and I’m fascinated with angles so I’d have to say the content was there, but my apprehension didn’t do it as much justice as I’d hoped.