mark making: thumbnail sketches

Have I mentioned that I'm an art student? I know! I am tickled pink at being a student and really enjoy the work. I was saying in the class introduction forum that I am absolutely intimidated by a blank white page, and so drawing the thumbnail sketches was a bit of a struggle. However, I'm starting to draw as a daily practice. Yesterday at my professional development for work, I was doodling in between notetaking. 

I'd been pondering putting pen or pencil to paper all week and started sketching (and erasing) on Saturday. And it's only dealing with point and line in my Art 300 or 2 Dimensional Design course so far, but I FINISHED the first assignment. Not perfect but done just like in quilting. Sunday was overcast and therefore perfect lighting for photographing my sketches to upload to the course platform. I did forget to use the Snapseed app on my phone and must remember for the submission of subsequent assignments to fix the photos with the app. The room that gets the most light is my kitchen, and so I had to clear the plants on the windowsill in order to not have shadows cast on the photos. And hey! My orchid that I traded at the arboretum society for some ceramic planters I made is blooming!

Okay ignore the mess that is in my atrium. 

The first assignment was to sketch horizontal and vertical lines.

The instructor told us to study previous student examples carefully in order to not deviate from the constraints of the assignment. I like constraints, but I kind of didn't want to see other examples so as not to copy or emulate. There was an example that I noticed look like a plaid. I felt like a copycat in that respect, but I do like plaids and am feeling that this assignment could turn into a quilt pattern. I also like hatch marks that I've seen on some pottery surfaces, and so that's another possible final painting. But what I'm liking now about the 4th sketch above is the illusion of depth or a vanishing point--it looks like a hallway leading to a door, and that might be my main assignment on horizontal and vertical lines variation. Only in the final collage, I won't place any lines in the door--just a dot to suggest a doorknob.

Sketching diagonal lines on to a page was a lot more fun.

I'm really fond of the diagonal lines crisscrossing in the shape of a circle. The instructor specifically said we're not to cut out shapes from the painted sheets--only lines. But this variation is an opportunity to make hatch marks, and crosses are one of my favorite things now in modern quilting. But again I'm fond of the first diagonal line sketch, and maybe I want the main assignment for the diagonal lines variation to be suggestive of a ball of yarn, and I want most of the negative space to be surrounding the orb.

Ah! The curved line. My favorite because I love a Hokusai print, and of late, become a fan of Chiura Obata's California landscapes. I love Obata's Japanese aesthetic and that intersection of abstraction and realism in his art

You can see in my first thumbnail (going left to right and then down) that influence from quilting or that free motion meandering stitch I tried to master from the first time I ever used a long arm machine. And I can see in my second thumbnail, using the orb again for negative space within rather than outside of it. And ugh! I really need to practice making curves look more graceful and sinuous. Our instructor had included in one of his modules, a page from Hamonshu: a Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs (1903). If I'm going to sketch every day by copying, then I need to practice there.

The last 4 thumbnails I sketched were probably where I was able to get looser and more improvisational, probably because I was warmed up from drawing so many different lines. Patrick said he liked the first of these. I'm pondering whether to compose an abstract landscape with sun (hatched curved lines), clouds (concentric curved lines), sky (horizontal lines), rain (hatched vertical lines), mountains (diagonal lines), terrain (more horizontal lines but with end points and of many different lengths, and ocean waves (curved lines, of course). 

And because Patrick is drawn to the first thumbnail sketch, I'm too finding it more visually appealing, mostly because I'm liking how much more graceful my linework is in that sketch than other curved lines I've drawn so far. What's going to be challenging to execute this pattern in a main assignment is drawing and cutting the Japanese waves and ripples before laying them down for gluing on to a white background page. Thick and thin lines, and thin lines are going to be a lot more arduous to cut. I'd also better start practice like right NOW to draw those almost-spirals as well as painting paper to have lines to cut out.