Review of the learning process through this project
The greatest surprise in this project was the torn paper collage. I had no idea how to approach this, and then it turned out that following my instinct I created an image that worked for me. But I acknowledge that this did not come out of nowhere. I think the intense detail study of the celery root has contributed to building up knowledge about the shapes and patterns that I found characteristic and relevant for my object. Then at one point I let go to make this visible, rather than trying to depict literally what I saw in front of me. I think the collage is a personal success and I’m very happy with it.
The next best thing was the inspiration to experiment with sgraffito. It came out of the frustration with trying to depict the tiny details and feeling that I wasn’t able to do it with the media I tried out so far. Pastels had worked in principle, permitting to draw light over dark, but I found the lines too soft and bold even with pastel pencils. The first sgraffito in yellow and black, the framed section of the celery root, was the second most interesting work for me in this project. It gave me a similar feeling of liberation and doing something that suited my personal style.
Over the entire project, I struggled with my reading of the instructions to ‘depict the object’. In an attempt to follow, I kept on depicting the entire object and exhausted myself with this. Probably it would have been better to make only a single attempt at depicting the whole, then do only sections. But on the other hand, I appreciate what I learned about depicting the entire complex object, in particular how difficult it is to create coherence between the different parts of the shape.
I nearly killed myself trying to draw the complex root patterns with the tiny little root stumps. This has most probably to do with age-related deteriorating eyesight. Expressed numerically it is not much, like plus/minus 1 in both short- and longsightedness, but it suffices to make reading small details nearly impossible. Glasses don’t really help and I get a headache from wearing them. As a consequence, I tried to smooth out the shapes and searched for larger elements I could visually process, but this led to a stylized representation which I did not really like.
Reviewing all the drawings I made, I think maybe the first one was the most successful in terms of realistic depiction, because it was the least stylized and least simplified. I had a fresh mind and was curious about the object. Later attempts suffered a bit from my increasing impatience and exhaustion from the task of drawing the entire object again and again.
So I realize where this got me – good acquaintance with my object – but if I were to do a similar project, I think I would do fewer ‘whole object’ drawings and rather focus on just sections and draw these using a variety of different media and approaches. This would help keeping up interest and motivation, and I could design each task so that it can be completed in 2 to 3 hours or maybe a day. That said, I am aware that producing a larger drawing or painting can easily entail working over several days or weeks on a single piece, until it can be considered finished. I’m willing to do this if I get involved with a piece, but I doubt this will occur when I’m trying to do accurate, realist representation, because it’s just not the road I want to take.
So basically, I learned a lot about my preferences from this project. I seem to feel much more comfortable with a more expressionist and abstract approach. So when it comes to technical skills, I am a bit at a loss. Measured in terms of ability to depict photorealistically, it’s just so-so… The last line drawing (black fineliner, in the sketchbook) and the tonal studies in soft pencil are quite successful. The colour studies all look a bit weird. The stronger works are those where only a section of the object was depicted, and where I permitted myself to depart from realism. So basically I’m again at that point of non-compatibility between my naïve understanding of the central aspect of this option (realistic depiction of a natural object) and my personal preferences (experiment, invent, abstract).
Preparatory studies
I began work for the assignment drawing by taking another close look at my chosen object, the celery root. The exercises of part 5 had convinced me that I wanted to draw only a section, and I wanted to review possible angles and viewpoints, using my viewfinder. After settling on one view that I found particularly interesting, I made a large compositional sketch using charcoal. I tried to work out the drawing but soon stopped because I charcoal was too bold to express tonal gradations and I did not want to smudge the medium. (charcoal on gray paper, 70 x 50 cm)
As a next step, I wanted to make a coloured tonal study. I had liked the soft green of the earlier sgraffito close-up and wanted to try how the green would work when blended with a darker tone and black. In the sketchbook I checked the colours and how they would blend.
I chose oil pastel with the idea of creating the larger shapes through blending of tones and then scratching in the finer details as light lines on dark background. I was satisfied with the three dimensionality of this study and how I developed a second layer of receding shapes by using the darker tone. But I found the sgraffito technique did not work out on the larger scale and this was the moment where I abandoned the idea for the final drawing. (green, gray and black oil pastel with sgraffito, A3)
In the next study, I wanted to try out a different technique. I began with a line sketch using 9B graphite stick and then added some yellow and orange for colour. I had also changed the composition slightly to check whether the different angle permitted to bring out the shapes somewhat clearer. I liked the effect of partially washing away the hard hatching lines and then working over it, but I found that my drawing of the object had not enough overall coherence. It was as if the various shapes and lines did not belong to a single object. (9B graphite stick, inktense coloured pencils and wash, 54 x 43 cm)
I thought this might be a consequence of leaving out the background and therefore reconsidered the composition. To try out an idea for improvement, I made a small compositional sketchbook study of a section of the celery with some background to the right of it. The important part of it was that the background was light in the upper half and dark in the lower half, that the celery changed its predominant tone from dark in its upper half to lighter in its lower half. I found this helped to hold the object together. (black fineliner, 23×30 cm sketchbook)
I tried this composition on a larger scale in the next drawing. Here I chose watersoluble wax crayons to see whether this would work well for blending tones. I began with a light turqoise, then added black for shadings, then needed yellow to emphasize the forms and reworked with white for highlights and black for the darkest tones. I think the drawing was quite energetic but the technique and the colours did not work well to create the subtler structures on the celery surface. I also found the colour choice around green and black not pleasing (wax crayon and wash on gray paper, 41 x 34 cm)
So for the next drawing, I chose coloured graphite pencils and began a line drawing in brown. I focused on the intertwining shapes and tried to disentangle them clearly. I added some shadings and then worked over the drawing with a wash. The drawing was nice but lacked contrast, so I added deep black charcoal lines. This unfortunately destroyed the entire subtlety of the tonal study, and I decided to take the charcoal off, using a paper tissue and rubber. The result was still quite dulled, therefore I took up an idea from the torn paper collage and used white gouache to bring back the light tones on the shapes. At this stage, I found that the drawing needed to include more of the surface texture of the celery, and applied some orange ink with a dip pen. But I did not at all like the effect and switched to a dark brown tone. I tried to work in the darker areas but at this point I found that I had spoiled the drawing, and I stopped.
The composition of this drawing was slightly changed – I had dismissed the separating horizon line in favour of a graded background from light to dark downwards. This was set against the celery which became lighter towards the bottom. I found this looked quite interesting and helped to make the celery become clearer as an object in itself. But with the dark hatching, this rather subtle effect was destroyed. Adding the dark ink hatching was a bad decision because it destroyed a drawing that had developed into an interesting painting. I thought about adding another layer of paint over the hatching but decided against this and just leave it at that because I felt it had gone too far away from what I would want to submit as assignment drawing.
At this point, I was deeply frustrated by the conflict between two seemingly opposing approaches to the task. I felt that I would like to do something similar to the torn paper collage – generous, energetic, rough and full of contrast. On the other hand, I did not know how to accommodate this style of working with naturalistic observation, which I perceived as critically important according to assessment criteria. During my work on the preparatory drawings, I had been quite experimental, with a variety of media and trying different compositions. I felt that I had made some progress with capturing the complex shapes, and that line and tone began to work quite well. But so far I had not been able to capture the characteristics of the surface textures of my celery, and I found this was a missing aspect. I made two quick surface texture sketches using line, but I had doubts I could ever be patient enough to do this kind of detail work on a larger scale like an A2 drawing. (black fineliner and brown coloured pencil, 23 x 30 cm sketchbook).
While working on the exercises and the preparatory studies, I had developed several visual ideas for my final drawing. An early one was based on the light green colour, but I had abandoned after the two green studies it because I found the green spectrum looked too artificial. A later idea was based on dark red, and I phantasized of a pastel drawing on dark red paper, with white and black, using the dark red background as a mid tone. I had no dark red paper available but wanted to try out this colour theme. I used dark gray paper with dark red as primary colour and light rose plus dark brown as supporting tones for the next study. This didn’t work out as expected. I found that I had to lighten up the entire drawing to make the object coherent and that the medium would not permit to draw subtleties of the surface texture. I abandoned this drawing because it was not the approach I wanted to take for the final drawing. What I liked was the very energetic style and the roughness of the line work. (chalk pastel on dark gray paper, 65 x 50 cm)
The final drawing
After the pastel sketch, I had to take a break because my holidays had come to an end and work commitments took over, once again. I did not have the energy to continue working on the assignment in the evenings after work, but I thought a little pause might be beneficial to get some distance and review critically what I had done so far, and maybe approach the task with new energy and a fresh mind on the next weekend. I had attached the torn paper collage and all preparatory studies to the wall in my study and spent half an hour every now and then to just look at my drawings and review the development so far. I was very unsure how to proceed because I did not know how to reconcile my desire for a strong, energetic drawing with the requirement to depict realistically and include some detail.
But during the pause, I came back to my third vision for the final drawing. This had been the most persistent phantasy and it developed around a white background, with brown lines and hatching for shades, but also some blue and dark black lines. I envisioned something very energetic which resembled the torn paper collage. This vision had been the guiding idea for the two coloured pencil with wash drawings, and I found that the colour scheme worked better than the others I had explored so far. So I decided to select this approach for the final drawing.
I began the weekend working session with another search for a good composition and decided on a view which resembled that of the initial charcoal and green-black oil pastel drawings. It is roughly the same section, but changes occurred because the celery has dried out and this altered the appearance of the little roots.
For the drawing I chose watersoluble coloured graphite pencils. I started with an outline sketch in brown and added some shadings, then applied a wash to smooth out the shapes. The next layer was done in blue to give the drawing some depth and add colour. The final layer was in black, again smoothed out using a wash. I reworked here and there, but refrained from adding a black linear medium because I was too afraid to again destroy the subtlety of some effects, as I had done with charcoal in the earlier drawing of this colour scheme.
It was not easy to decide when to stop, but I think I worked out the drawing sufficiently up to a point where the shapes and tones begin to “talk to each other”. I perceive coherence between elements, such that the lighter shapes correspond to each other and form overarching entities, and so do the darker areas. It is about as far as I can get for now. I think the drawing is not as energetic as the torn paper collage, but there is nevertheless much energy and movement, and there is a good tonal range with deep contrast. This drawing is a more realistic depiction of the celery than the preparatory studies, closer to naturalistic observation. I think this is a result of the choice of colours and also due to the inclusion of some surface texture.
