Assignment 4: Exercise 2: Opening Lines

This exercise investigates the use of line. With an HB pencil we were to draw 5 minute line drawings of the following items:

• A cup or vase or similarly smooth object.

• A piece of furniture like a table or chest of drawers.

• An article of clothing, like a pair of trousers or shirt folded or screwed up so there are contours and folds.

• Either a portrait of the face of someone you know, live with or a self-portrait drawn in a mirror.

• A view of the outside world, maybe your garden or street or the view through your window.

Here are my drawings:

A cup

A chair

Some fluffy socks

A self portrait

The street outside

We were also advised to use as few lines as possible.

I found it hard to fill the 5 minutes on each drawing except for the socks. The problem with this was that I ended up adding unnecessary and less connected lines rather than staring at my watch. Initially I tried to draw ‘properly’ in terms of using straight lines and making shapes match up, so that the squares on the mug followed the same curves, for example. As I progressed through the drawings I loosened up and just finished when I’d finished rather than try to fill the 5 minutes. I also abandoned the attempt to draw straight lines. This felt more natural and more to my style. I enjoyed being able to exaggerate the downhill slope of the houses by making the verticals lean downhill a bit too. Somewhere in my head I had the idea that 5 minute drawings are supposed to be realistic, perhaps from drawing observation exercises when I did my A level about 25 years ago. I decided, gradually, to disregard that idea and draw the way I draw.

The next part of the exercise was to put these 5 drawings onto an A3 piece of paper and create a composition, possibly adding some extra lines such as a window frame to make the composition into a room.

I realised that I would need to cut out my images in order to make them fit, so I did this first. I then arranged the elements in a range of configurations to get a feel for how they might work together. Here are some of these.

I preferred this last one as I could imagine the cup being on the window ledge, slightly obscuring the view of the street outside, with the chair being in front of the window. I tried, in the first image, to put the socks on the chair, but that didn’t really work. While everything in the composition is out of scale with the other things, the socks looked like they could have actually been left on the chair - but only if they were something bigger than socks. In compositions where everything was out of scale this didn’t matter so much. It’s somehow easier to accept that everything’s weird than to accept that most of it is weird apart from this thing that is a bit less weird. 

Anyway, I was happy with this composition so I got the glue and stuck it down. 

I added some lines to suggest  the window and window ledge, a picture on the wall, and my hand holding the socks. The addition of the picture drew attention to the wrong part of the composition and I would have been better to leave that as blank wall. I left it in rather than rubbing it out in order to have a visual reminder of what I didn’t like about it.

It was fun doing the cutting and gluing. Moving the objects around gave me the opportunity to look at the 3 dimensions, in that I could place things behind or in front of each other and create different effects  I went down a conventional route in terms of the placement of images within a scene, I guess I was guided by the brief which suggested placing objects in a room. It would have been interesting to follow the route of the first composition where the person was behind the view outside the window, and place objects in different orientations. However, I did that in the previous assignment so I didn’t follow that route on this occasion  I would like to experiment more in that direction though, if time allows.