Tutor Report

Overall Comments

What you need to send me for each assignment are your exercises and projects and

the assignment pieces themselves and examples from your learning log and sketch books.

The exercises and projects can be on loose sheets so that you can vary the size and

paper type. What you have sent me is fine for assignment 1 though.

You do need to be making sketch books to augment what you do in addition to the

exercises and projects. If you go for assessment you will need between 3 and 6 of

varying sizes. I will speak about this later in the report.

Your learning log needs to be an entity in itself and not attached to your drawings. You can

do this on the computer so that you can import images also to enhance your text and you

can print it out easily. I will talk about learning logs again later. You can present this in an

A4 ring binder or indeed do it as a blog on line. This is up to you, but how you have done

it for this assignment is unsatisfactory both in format and content.

The reasoning behind how this course is organized is that having done the exercises

and projects you can bring the experience, knowledge and know how into the resultant

assignment pieces. This is worth remembering as you progress.

Feedback on assignment

Good drawing essentially almost always contains aspects of the exercises that you have

done in this part of the course. Good tonal understanding, inventive and appropriate

mark making, varied use of line, an understanding of light source, good composition

and inventive and appropriate use of the media to render a particular subject effectively.

Your experimentations and try outs work is imaginative and exploratory, full of varied

line, tone and different applications for the drawing media.

What is important here is that you implement a full range of tone, a variety of

appropriate mark making, varying uses of line and a good understanding of your light

source as you draw. These are not just exercises but tools to use as you progress and

develop.

Basic shapes

Your understanding of ellipses gets better the more that you do, which is how it should

be. The pan on the same page as the earphones shows really good observation and the

way that you have found the ellipses and form is spot on. Leaving the corrected lines

in is fine. By the time that you get to the cheese grater drawing you are really getting to

grips with some complex issues of perspective and eye level. This drawing is not perfect

by any means but it does have character and integrity.

The principle is that the closer to eye level an ellipse is the narrower it is. If you look

from directly above at a cylindrical object, in fact, you will see a circle. If you look

straight on at eye level at the top of a cylindrical object, there would be a line. Ellipses

range from none to a full circle. They all must refer to eye level. You do need to look

very hard when you draw, draw what you see, not what you think that you see. If it

doesn’t look right you need to alter, re draw, re look until you get the objects operating

in 3 dimensions effectively. You have started to do this very well in your pencil studies

and some of them are very effective indeed.

The parallel perspective principle is that parallel edges recede to a vanishing point which

may well be off the paper. Again most artists will not grid up their work with vanishing

points but will look very hard and use their eyes to determine correct perspective.

Distorted perspective needs to have intent and be in the right context otherwise it just

looks wrong.

Tone and Form

The tone and form page in the A3 book demonstrates that you are starting to understand

much more succinctly how to manipulate marks to establish forms in space that relate

to a ground. The pencil and the ink versions are really operating effectively.

The best drawing so far is the study of the bananas and eggs on a plate. This very

well observed and the objects sit well in 3 dimensions. The light source is beautifully

rendered and you have dealt with the different textures sensitively. Well Done! You must

look to this drawing as a qualitative bench mark as you progress. You must try to sustain

this effort throughout an assignment and indeed the course.

Reflected Light

The pencil study is well observed although the ellipse is out on the pan. This said you

have captured the reflective qualities of the objects well. The lack of a drawn outline is

really working well in terms of tone but may be the breadth of tone could have been

greater.

The foreshortening of the pan handle is compositionally very effective in terms of

how you manipulate space, bear this in mind for the future as it is rather unusual.

Still life

Both batches of still life work are operating very effectively. You use the media

appropriately both in the pencil and pen versions and the charcoal versions. These

are examples of real quality in terms of the fundamental aspects of drawing that I

mentioned earlier. The fruit drawings are splendid, and deserve commending (please

look at these in reference to the large assignment pieces).

A Drawing with texture

This drawing is very flaccid and you have not really got to grips with exploring

the possibilities that texture offers in terms of mark making and the activation of the

surface of a drawing. There is no tonal range here which there should be. The invention

that you need in terms of mark making is also absent from this piece and the marks are

very wooly and approximated.

Texture is an important part of drawing and combines with the other fundamentals to

produce effective work if used creatively and with intent. This drawing is too generalized

and lacks focus.

Assignment 1

Still life with Natural forms 

The studies for this assignment piece get better as we reach the third one where you are

just beginning to get to grips with the nature of objects in 3 dimensions in colour.

However the tonal range in colour is not wide enough to establish the objects

convincingly enough.

In the large assignment piece itself the range of colour say in the reds in the pepper would

go from pinkish to almost purpley red to almost blue to really give it the depth that it

needs. Look at how Cezanne paints fruit; this should help you in understanding this.

There is very little tonal range in this drawing and as I look and half close my eyes there

 is in fact hardly any. You have to read this tonal distribution in order to make a

drawing effective. In shape, to a large extent, the vegetables are well observed but you

need to capture the different texture much more succinctly through the mark

making employed. You captured the tonal range very well in some of the charcoal drawings

 in the drawing book but have not yet understood how this happens in colour.

Shadows and spaces between objects are just as important as the objects themselves in

the overall composition.

Shadows are made up of a mixture of object colour and ground colour and variations

thereof bearing in mind all colours in a particular piece will have a greater or lesser affect

on each another. They are not made up of a neutral grey as in your drawings.

The parts of this drawing do not have enough of a relationship to each other in terms

of existing in proximity to each other and operating in 3 dimensions. You need to get to

grips with shadows, reflected colour and the layering that can be achieved when using

colour, all of which will help you establish more convincing relationships and a better whole.

In some ways it would have been good to see you make this drawing in charcoal to see if

you could have retained the high quality of some of the B/W studies. You will have a lot

more opportunities to develop your use of colour in assignment 2.

Still life with man made forms

The preparatory drawings for this are to some extent generalized and for the most part not

as well observed as you are capable of. As preparatory drawings they do not give you

enough information to work from in terms of tone variation and mark making or

indeed composition. They are a little rushed and unfocussed. One is better than the

other 2 but I can’t pick it out. It is the first one in the book as you look through.

This general feel is apparent in the assignment pieces themselves. What lets both these

larger drawings down is the unfocussed looking and the looseness in how you have

interpreted what you have seen in the charcoal, especially in terms of tone and mark

making. The tonal range could also be more specific to the shapes and to insides and

outsides. Your mark making could more inventive also especially in the reflective areas of

the drawings. You have to work /draw to get internal relationships right as they refer both

to each other and to the whole. You have been too easily satisfied here.

I don’t think that you have looked hard enough when working on these drawings and you

really have not been particular enough in interpreting what you have been looking at. 

You have demonstrated your very competent use of charcoal in lots of your studies but

failed to carry the successes through to the assignment pieces.

You really need to work out why this has been the case. Have a look at the large drawings

and compare them objectively to some of the studies. Comment in your learning log.

Try using just good quality cartridge paper for your large drawings rather than the oil

paper which is not taking the charcoal or pastel well enough, especially in terms of

tonal range.

Learning logs/critical essays

I have spoken earlier about your learning log and the format that it can take.

The learning log should contain, whatever format you choose, objective and

comparative comments on your own work and development. Comments on work of

other artists relevant to what you are doing. Evidence of art you have seen, in the

flesh in books or on the web – with images, annotated where necessary. The log should

also contain the set theoretical studies from the course and your tutor reports and should

be a stand alone document.

You need to be keeping sketch books also, which will have more supporting studies in,

tryouts experiments etc recorded in various media in visual terms. Sketchbooks are a

good source of ideas and can give clues as to what you are interested in and reveal

your strengths and weaknesses.

Suggested reading/viewing

Look at as much art as possible as this will help give you a context in a wider sense.

Look at Cezanne, Degas, Durer and Matisse. The drawings of Seurat and Van Gogh will help

you in terms of tone and mark making.
 

Other

You have lots of potential as demonstrated by some of the work in this assignment,

especially in the book. You have the wherewithal to be successful on this course.

However, you do need to sustain the act of drawing as you work, much more, and not be

too easily satisfied. You need to develop a dialogue between yourself, the subject,

the medium and the drawing. You need a fuller conversation when you draw!

Some of the work looks a little rushed at times and your effort in terms of your approach to what you do comes across as uneven. 

When you set some high benchmarks, as you have in this assignment, you need to

try to maintain them and indeed improve on them.