CHARCOAL PIECES


 EXPERIMENTING

To begin my personal project, I created two rough charcoal pieces with the intention of showing emotion attached to loss through body posture & facial expression. I chose charcoal as its an expressive media & is good for sketching as its easy to change & adapt when mistakes are made. It keeps the drawing loose rather than uniformed & precise which is good when presenting strong emotion like in these pieces. 

The first piece is of a woman on the floor cross legged, looking as though she's holding herself together amidst a breakdown as my focus at this point was the feelings experienced after losing someone. The awkwardly scrunched over position gives a cramped & uncomfortable & isolated feel to the piece.  

When doing charcoal I like using straight lines to further express the emotion I want to portray in the piece. It also makes the piece look less uniformed but mixes well with the curved lines that form the body. The background contrasts with the central image as I used the side of the charcoal to create blocked lines. The layering of them sort of creates a checkered look & makes the piece look busier, which helps represent how she is feeling.

The second piece holds emotion in the face rather than expression through the body. This is especially portrayed through the expressive use of media using rough smudged lines to darken areas or add something to the background.



‘London Drawings: After Auerbach’ - Ruhul Abdin
This piece is by an artist called Ruhul Abdin who is based in Bangladesh. I felt this expressive charcoal piece relates to the man I drew as the approach is quite similar. There’s lines crossing over the face & the face isn’t overly detailed. A rubber was used to create highlights in the piece too which is something I also did in my work. 

FURTHER MEDIA EXPERIMENTATION


This is another experimental piece I did on the train to college using fine liner. I really like this piece due to the style & techniques I used for shade & depth. The individual lines next to each other work really well to build up shadow in certain areas of the face. The shapes that frame certain parts of the face work well with the vibe of this piece too. The background works well with the foreground too as the lines going outwards lead your eyes to the centre of the piece. 
The media definitely fits the style & techniques I used as fine liner creates bolder darker lines which can also be made thicker or thinner to add variation to the piece. 



The final media experimentation piece I did was of my pet rats as one of them was really ill & I thought she was going to pass away. I wanted to create a piece to go by the cage & scenes as though my project is about loss I felt it would be appropriate. I like the flowers round the edge of this piece as I feel they frame it well, however, I don’t like how dark the thing they’re sitting on is as it doesn’t suit the rest of the piece. 
The rat on the right is also done smoother than the one on the left. The one on the left is the first one I did & I accidentally started off too dark. However, they still look good next to each other. 
The style is a lot neater & more detailed than the face piece. If I were to do this in fine liner i wouldnt have been able to add smaller softer details in the fur. It would have worked if I wanted to do a more cartoony version of a rat. 
Charcoal would also have completely changed this piece as charcoal is a more expressive media so the piece would look less neat & book-illustration like & instead it would be darker & heavier with bolder thicker lines.


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