Assignment !0: Self-Directed Project: In the Kitchen - Experiments

Having completed my visual research and generation of ideas, I decided to try out some different ways of drawing vegetables as a way into exploring the theme of this brief: food of the world. During this process I’ve loosely held the idea of illustrating an article on recipes of the world that use onions. For this reason, I began by drawing onions.

Firstly I made some simple pencil drawings exploring line and tone.

While the image below has a more ‘finished’ appearance, I keep returning to the above more scribbled and overlying drawings. They feel more alive than the more careful drawings below. Looking at them as I write this, I wonder how I might be able to recapture some of that liveliness as I make my final pieces.

I then took inspiration from the project brief and made some loose drawings in felt pens on the brown paper bag the onions had been inside.

I rather like these and I’m still using the bag for my onions! They were very quick sketches in which I picked up on the lined/creased texture of onion skins, which had got lost in my last pencil drawing.

Next I pulled out my Inktense pencils and a wet brush and did more of a colour study of the red onions.

I continued, but switching back to brown paper, in my usual style of pen outlines and coloured pencil drawings. I used a ‘vintage’ style printed paper and a plain sheet of Kraft paper to see how the pencils worked with the different backgrounds.

Perhaps due to the printed surface, this paper had very little tooth and so it was hard to build up layers. Even so, I like the way that the pencils retain their luminosity.

This drawing was less successful. I was thinking about layout and wondering how a tall, thin image might work on a side margin of the magazine spread, with the option of fading out the brown paper in a gradient under the text. 

From here I decided to move into collage and see how changing the medium would affect my process  I’ve enjoyed doing more collage in this unit and veg collage was no exception. To give myself leeway for trying different backgrounds, I made each onion as a piece in itself rather than beginning with a substrate  in a way the process resembled modelling as much as collage, but in a 2D form.

As I often do, I forgot about taking any ‘in progress’ photos, but here are some of the papers I pulled out of my colour-coded folders for consideration, with some feline supervision from Zoe!

Here is my first onion on different backgrounds for experimentation. I enjoyed making it so I made some more…

…And it was so much fun that I thought, why stop at onions? 

Then I went to bed.

I took a series of photos of my paper veg on brown paper bags and I edited them, then when I opened my gallery the next day I saw this grid formation.

I liked the way they looked so I had an experimental foray into the world of magazine layouts and created a spread with elements of the grid.

I didn’t like it. I had lost track of ‘fresh’. I’m glad I made the layout so that I could see that I’d gone off track.

Prior to this, I decided to photograph my paper veg on a table top to resemble a wooden chopping board. I tried a few arrangements with different magazine layouts in mind.

While the chopping board idea makes sense, I could see from my experimental layout that the colours need to pop a bit more, so I’m going to try changing the colour scheme to include some blue from the other side of the colour wheel. I could do this by including some other elements such as crockery or a tablecloth, or even a blue wall as a backdrop. I went back to my visual research and spent some time looking again at these in particular:

In the Slimming World spread the simple use of blue accessories brings a freshness to the photos. In Danielle Vaughan’s collage the basket of fruit floats on a collaged blue background, and in MA’s collage of lemons the collaged blue elements give the impression of a surface. These are not complex solutions to incorporate. I also wonder whether I should take what I’ve learnt through collage back into drawing with coloured pencils or marker pens. I could also include drawings of herbs and spices, or their containers, to reference how these veg are cooked differently around the world, and I want to recapture the liveliness of those early pencil/pen drawings. More to ponder and more work laid out before me in order to reach my final design.