Assignment !0: Self-Directed Project: In the Kitchen - More Experiments Towards Finished Pieces

Having completed my previous post I was, quite literally, back to the drawing board! I wanted to see whether my drawings could be looser, more lively, and informed by me having collaged the veg. I began with coloured pencils.

I was rather unimpressed with my efforts. Perhaps coloured pencils don’t lend themselves to scribble. I’m much more used to building up careful layers. The peppers were the most dismal examples - there was no sense of the third dimension and the cross hatching was hopeless for the ultra smooth surface of peppers. I liked the tomatoes and carrots more. I could develop a technique here in terms of scribbling tone. An experiment for another day.

The thing to love about marker pens is they’re so quick for laying down colour. However, I was equally unimpressed with these. I think I just really like my little collaged veg so my heart wasn’t in finding an alternative.

I realised that, for all of my veg drawing, I still didn’t have a design in mind for the magazine spread. I felt that I couldn’t really progress any further until I got that sorted out, so it was time for composition thumbnails, which are quickly becoming my go-to technique.

Half way down the page I felt things weren’t working. I wanted that dynamic, fresh feeling that the brief described. I thought about the arms-in-the-air V-shape of joy and drew a few layouts with this in mind. Half way back up the right hand column I wanted to simplify. I remembered about diagonals conveying direction and movement, and this linked with the ‘round the world’ aspect of the brief. I thought about my line of veg collages and imagined the veg marching off into the distance to find new ways to be cooked.

I developed this idea, first with a straight diagonal and then with a more meandering and narrowing line. I liked both and held both in mind as I continued, but with the knowledge that the straight line would be easier to achieve, and also that it would give a simpler and cleaner look.

I lined up my veg again for a photo shoot.

Then Photoshop crashed!

I was getting uncomfortably close to my deadline so I decided to see what I could do with other software. I wanted to try out different coloured backgrounds for the veg. I wanted fresh, but not anything that would overwhelm the veg themselves, I used PSExpress to generate some backgrounds without worrying too much about their effect on the colours of the veg as these were only intended for research. I made these.

I realised that, with my screen in dark mode, I was seeing all the colours against a black background, which I didn’t have in mind for the magazine spread. While the page background might not be white, I thought it would probably be a light colour. So I switched to light mode and saw these.

So I didn’t get my white background, but, even so, I could see the colours working differently on each other without all the black. I picked out a few with potential and lined them up with white space around them.

This was such a simple thing to do, but it really helped me to see how the colours were working.

I liked the blue and yellow and wondered how they would look together, thinking back to MA’s collage of lemons. Unfortunately it looked like veg on a beach!

I reversed the colours and also tried green. All these were done by cropping sections of the images and laying one on top of the other. Not very professional but it served its purpose.

I liked both of these, but felt that veg in a landscape was stretching the boundaries of the brief’s title, “In the Kitchen”! The blue and yellow could, at a stretch, suggest a kitchen worktop and wall.

As I looked at these images I concluded that the veg looked too regimented and could do with adopting some livelier poses. I also decided to make some utensils as a way to incorporate some blue into the design other than just in the background. I like how this worked In the Slimming World magazine spread. This would also enable me to include some herbs and spices, which are so essential to cooking recipes from different countries. I had a fun hour or so making these:

Even though all my mini collages were of a size to fit in my hand, getting them all to line up required a long piece of paper. I stuck three A3 pieces of paper together, and later added an A4 sheet to give a little extra length. You can get an idea of the scale of it by seeing the ends of my feet in the photo.

This made them look a bit more jaunty. At last I felt that I was on my way to combining “relaxed” and “dynamic”; a challenge that I’d worried I couldn’t fulfil.

Next I needed to produce the background. I decided to go with the yellow and blue, and I sponged thinned down acrylic paint onto the great expanse of paper as a base. I thin added strips of coloured papers in a fairly random way, not expecting myself to entirely cover the surface but to add enough for interest. I’m not sure that I achieved this - perhaps fewer colours or fewer strips would have been better, with hindsight.

Once it was dry I put it on the floor, which is the only place it can lie flat! I placed the collages and sat back and looked at my creation.

I realised that the background was too intensely coloured and patterned. The collaged strips looked like part of the foreground. I decided to try knocking the colour back, and thought the simplest way to do this would be to add a thin layer of gesso. I tried it along the left edge but I didn’t like the chalky appearance.