Foreword
Earlier this year, I took Ian Roberts' "Mastering Composition" course. I found it incredibly informative, interesting and enjoyable. While the focus was obviously on composition, the course also helped improve my artistic practice in general, largely due to a 30 day drawing challenge, held after the course ended. In the past, I heard numerous artists talk about the importance and benefits of daily (or at least regular), drawing practice. Hearing artist Andrew Tischler talk about his own Sketchendeavour (on his You Tube channel), got me intrigued enough to actually consider doing an art challenge. So, when an opportunity presented itself, I felt ready to dive in.
Because this was not specifically a drawing course, the aim did not lie in producing "finished", high-end, best quality work, but rather something akin to good working drawings. The type one would do when still trying to work out general concepts, positioning, values, i.e. composition, prior to starting finished work, but past the stage of sketches and thumbnails. Such drawings give a good general idea and flavour of an image, without large investment of time, energy and money. Still, because they need to reflect the essence of the planned work, they do require some level of drawing skill and efficiency, and that is where regular practice can be very beneficial. I need to add that in real life, these drawings look more smooth and presentable. I photographed them with iPhone15, and the photos emphasize every single bit of texture and graininess (I'm not the only one who encountered this issue).
All drawings for this challenge were done from
reference photos, which were taken either by the course instructor, or myself. I
will not include these photos in my posts, since the aim was not to copy them,
but use them as reference, meaning lots of tweaks, additions, deletions,
etc. However, I will still indicate whether an individual drawing was
done using my or the course photo.We were allowed to draw the same subject as many times, as we liked, and I did end up with a few similar images. One reason is that I simply enjoyed some subjects enough to draw them again. Also, it was not easy to come up with 30 completely new images, edit and crop them, then do a roughly 4x6" drawing, and keep on schedule. While we were allowed to do more than one drawing per day, I simply did not find the time to do that. In fact, to the very end I wasn't sure if I'd be able to complete 30 drawings in 30 days. This is one of the reasons why I post all of this after the fact, as doing so in real time would have been too time consuming, and the probability that I'd just quit mid-way would have been very high.
DAY 1 - Barn
At the very beginning of the course, we were tasked with drawing a barn from a given photo. As part of the 30 Day Challenge I decided to draw the same barn again, to see not only how my drawing has changed, but also how I would crop it the second time around. I must say, that even though the later drawing was done much more loosely and quickly, the overall flavour and character of the image has not changed that much. Lesson learned - that I can skip many details and nuances (and save so much time), and still get a reasonably realistic and clear image.
First barn drawing (on Denik, Heavyweight, Mixed Media Sketchbook paper):
Second barn drawing (on Strathmore Bristol smooth, 300 series):
*** Because I might use some of the images for future work, I kindly ask that you do not copy or use my drawings as ideas or reference for your own work, or re-post them elsewhere.
Link to my Instagram page here.
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