After assessing what I have produced and learned, I decided to incorporate what I learned from my tutor, disregard what I was comfortable with, and use a medium that I wasn’t familiar with. My only theory being if I couldn’t pull it off i need to give up!
My choice was the figure and the face. I decided to do a piece that would try to describe the current situation on a lot of peoples minds during the pandemic and lockdown which which was isolation. Art can be an isolating pursue in itself, but I was leaning more towards the idea of social isolation that a lot of people have been feeling.
Originally I tried out an idea of drawing my face in different positions on a mirror in acrylic pens, hoping to add in detail afterwards. This was an initial idea that, although sounded great in my head, proved difficult due to keeping my head straight while drawings it was difficult, and also having to squint to keep the angle. All outcomes I didn’t want in the final piece. I also discovered that a mirror doesn’t allow for perspective like a camera or normal vision does and no matter how close or far away I positioned my head they all looked the same size. Even from the other side of the room!
Medium – My choice of medium was oil pastels. Exploring colour a little more, but also using the technique of applying turps to the pastel to create a more fluid, water colour wash that I could build on with the pastels and using colour pencil to give me a defined edge.
I then made some prep drawing of different heads and colour schemes.
Theory – Using the first exercise of emotional mark makings as an inspiration I based this drawing on 4 stages of feelings, calm, intrigue, joy, anger, as a lot of people have gone felt these emotions throughout lockdown, and maybe will be able to connect with this.
Using a 40x100cm canvas lengthways I wanted to tell a story like a scroll of the different emotions people have gone through during lockdown. I sketched 4 of my own head showing the emotions of calm, intrigue, joy and anger to tell the story and joined the heads with other head sketches in varying degrees of completeness to give a rather confused, almost eerie feel to the painting.
I ended up using a mix of oil pastel turps, biro and coloured pencil to build up the different layers of detail.
This is what I came up with….
Detail
Using this as a support board, I then worked over it adding more faces and layering it with oil pastel.
Investigating with colours for the background i added some blues and greens to give a bit of depth and contrast, and attempted to come up with a variety of colours for the faces, breaking it down into light, med and dark shadows I experimented with ochre, olive yellow and pale yellow, olive brown, brown and raw umber, sapphire blue, moss green and black respectively.
Straight away on the first face I found this way over the top and confusing as I was blending the pastels in smoothly and was not getting the effect I desired.
It was from short listing the colours down to white, ochre, pale yellow, burnt umber and black to keep it simple, and using only a few layers of each to blend that I found I got a much simpler, rougher style that I was looking for, working much better with the mood of the piece.
Although some of the detail was lost I think less was defiantly more in this case. Finishing of the faces and adding pastel to the background to balance it up, the overall shift in colour flows from light in the top right corner, degrading to dark in the bottom left to mimic the deterioration of the states of mind that people were going through during the pandemic.
Planning and drawing this was a lot of fun and was also a big learning curve. Using the pastels wasn’t something I was familiar with, and using extremely foreshortened faces was a challenge in itself so some of the detail and proportions were not as accurate as I would have likes, but I was happy with the colours, deciding that less was more, and the composition and all around atmosphere was what I was intending to explain the changes of mood and feeling during lockdown, ending in confusion, panic, helplessness and depression. Isolation.
As I mentioned above, I wanted to put myself out of my comfort zone to push the boundaries of my abilities so I could see where I was falling short, and what areas I need to work on to improve. This way I can constantly keep myself on my toes, and constantly improve my skills.
Eeyanski Arts 