This exercise focused on techniques like hatching and stippling to create shades of tone from light to dark, to be explored with lots of different media. It also asked to work out shapes and form.
The instructions confused me, because initially I did not know what I was expected to do – exploring mark-making ok, but to draw what?
After some initial attempts I decided to just try to create simple forms like a ball by shading in different tones of darkness. I also tried out some colouring. I liked the visual effect and attempted to make blendings between different colours.
Although I like the patterns I created, I didn’t like this exercise too much because it continued to confuse me and left me with a feeling of repeating something from memory, rather than exploring something new. I felt that I would have preferred to work after natural objects, rather than inventing shapes and shading them to create the illusion of volume. Maybe the problem was this interpretation of the task which led me into a direction that didn’t feel right.
I didn’t like stippling very much, because it took so long to make all those tiny dots. From the drawing tools I used here, stippling worked best with dip pen and ink, making tiny dashes rather than dots. This permitted to create darker shadings much faster and I also liked the subtle variation in tone from the coloured ink. But I will probably tend to avoid this technique in the future, as I find it too laborious and too slow when I’m in an energetic mood.
