My artist

The artist I have chosen is called Kelly Reemtsen and the reason that I picked her is because she specifically focuses on strong shadows in her work, similar to Wayne Thiebaud which was an artist I used in GCSE and really enjoyed his work. I will take some of my own photos based on her work using either my peers or me as the mode. As well as figurative work she also does still life which I will be working on as well as I want a combination of the two. To add my own twist I like the idea of only using black and white because my artist uses a lot of colour.

Lesson Reflection – using coffee

During this lesson, we used the same objects that we originally brought in and drew them once more, this time using a choice of our dry medium, for instance I chose pencil simply because that’s what I feel most comfortable drawing with, although other people used different things such as biro pen.

We also looked at pieces of work that had been put up on the wall for us done my other students. The work was mainly done using coffee so we took this idea and adapted it to our own work.

I did this by starting with using weak coffee on the background which a dripping effect to it by using a paint brush. After this I drew my object over whilst the coffee was still slightly wet to add some texture.

Then to add more detail to my drawing I did some light shading in pencil but mainly I used more coffee but this time I ensured that it was more concentrated so that I could use it to create shadow.

Lesson evaluation – drawing our objects

Today we used the objects that we had previously brought in and drew them in different ways buy looking at them at several different angles. Not only did we do this, we also used newspaper, we ripped the newspaper into different shapes and used it as a back ground or to emphasise a specific part of the object we were drawing. As well as newspaper, we used different mediums to add effect and texture, both wet and dry materials were used such as biro pen, emulsion paint and graphite sticks. To add extra tone I smudged the graphite on my paper to create a small shaded look.

As each drawing went on we built up more of each medium and by the final drawing I had used all three on just one study. Here are my 5 drawings below, beginning with just a simple biro drawing on a strip of newspaper.

One artist that I find inspiring on terms of this type of drawing is Carme Magem. I find her work interesting because I love the masses of texture and layers she uses. Her studies usually consist of human faces or parts of the human body and a lot of her work focuses of very famous people like ones from the 1950’s such as Marilyn Monroe. Obviously the biggest and most significant link to the work we did yesterday and this artist work is the use of newspaper which is my favourite part.

Art trip

On our trip we visited two different places in order to inspire our future projects and our current one of ‘who am I’. The places we visited were Oxford University Museum of Natural History and Ashmolean Museum. When we visited these, we took pictures of objects and paintings that we found interesting we also did small sketches. I enjoyed the Oxford University Museum of Natural History more because I found it much more interesting as I felt like there was a wider range to observe and it opened my mind more to different things.

I mostly took pictures because it was a more practical and efficient technique of capturing as much as I could in the short time we had. Here are just a few of my personal favourites.

this bat picture inspired me because it contained so many different textures and it was also slightly rustic due to the very minor holes in the wings.

 I also liked this insect because the colours on it are so bright, it caught my attention straight away which I want to happen with my art.

I thought this beehive piece was so interesting because it was like a small snapshot of their way of living and the bright silver bees stood out so much against their dull habitat.