Illustration 1000 Drawings

We've been encouraged to blog about our illustration work but told to use existing blogs that we have. For this project we were told to go to a museum of our choice and do a thousand drawings. I chose the Natural History museum so that I could draw dinosaurs. The first day I went was on a sunday. The exscuse I gave for the small amount of drawings I did was that the museum was packed out but in truth I wasn't really sure how to draw quickly, so I didn't, and I allowed a dislike of what I was drawing to put me off.

I went back again and this time sped myself up, not letting myself get disheartened by unsuccessful drawings, they weren't all good but I was pretty happy with a few of the drawings from this trip.

I got some feed back that I ought to focus more on the forms and less on the lines, so I acquired a graphite stick, and at my next museum trip I vowed to only work with graphite stick and felt tip pens (to force myself into colour as well). Using a chunkier medium really loosened me up and I began to really enjoy what I was doing. I struggled to make the felt tip pens work that well, but the graphite stick made me remember that I like drawing a lot, and how lucky was I that what my project came down to was just drawing my favourite animals.

I went back and this time drew solely with the graphite stick, I did around a hundred drawings in 6 hours, not all of them worked but a lot of them did, and as my enjoyment of the project grew so too did my confidence, which allowed me to draw more ambitiously and so I enjoyed it more.

I finished the sketchbook, full to the brim with drawings and felt that what I needed was to increase my page size. I decided to add a conte crayon to my tool kit. I hadn't worked with conte for a while, it allowed me to create more medium tone that I could then layer a dark graphite tone over. By this point I had well over a hundred more drawings than most of the class, so I decided to slow it down a bit and create some longer studies of a few particular favourites.

Finally I returned to the museum with an A3 sketchpad and a pack of never before used (but owned for 3 years) landscape chalky oil pastel sticks. They were almost all earthy tones, which is fine for a lot of animals anyway, and just like squares. So I had moved from the fine point of a pencil all the way through to the a flat edge of a landscape pastel, and I'm very happy with the progress I made as a result.

I learnt that drawing is a lot like music. Each time you draw something it's like trying to play a song, you can't expect to master it right away, but if you keep trying and don't throw your guitar on the floor cause you miss a note, then you will learn how to play it, and you'll be better at playing your instrument in general, able to learn the next song more quickly. And also that everything you do that you enjoy will be a lot more successful than things you don't enjoy. I bumped into a lot of kids in the museum from around the world and had them ask me all sorts, I don't mind chatting to people, and I was in such a good mood drawing all the time I couldn't help myself from chatting to them about drawing. I even had a group of btec students ask me to be their art teacher they were that inspired by me, which was a really good feeling. I started this project embarrassed about people seeing my drawings, and by the end I laid a big piece of paper out on the floor to draw on so that I could almost invite people to see my progress.