Drawing felt like a much more accessible way to make art. There was something about being directly connected to the instrument that helped to be in control. Through my drawing exploration, I discovered I really enjoy the texture drawing utensils make when smoothed on their sides. In the first picture, I experimented with three different utensils: colored pencil, charcoal, and a graphite pencil. The softer pencils created easy lines and did not require a lot of work to blend the lines together. The harder pencils had crisp, thin lines and struggled to easily and evely cover a large space. In the second picture I experimented with charcoal, chalk, crayon, and oil pastel. Chalk was frustrating to work with on paper. The dust got all over everything and did not stick to the paper like the oil-based products. The oil pastel was the most interesting to use. I didn’t realize what it was at first so I only pressed lightly on the paper. I tried pressing hard and discovered its smooth, creamy texture. The different utensils remind me of various musical elements. Drawing with oil pastel feels like singing a smooth legato melody while drawing with the charcoal felt like a jumpy staccato piece.
Next I explored with ink. Since I spent a lot of time playing with force for the other explorations, I decided to do something very delicate. I dipped the tips of a dry brush into wet ink and very lightly drew the paint brush diagonally across the paper. It is the darkest stroke; I used less ink on the brush for the other lines. I find the natural lines to be really calming and pleasing to look at. The pattern is different every time, even when I tried to recreate the same lines. I added circles, but it was harder to keep the ink from pooling when the bristles moved so close to each other. The last exploration was also exploring delicate strokes, but on the wide part of the utensil. I began by covering the paper with wide layers of light strokes. After piling the layers, I experimented with taking away color. First I used a blending stick. I like the cloudy way it mixed the colors and smoothed out the texture. The rubber eraser created more white space and did not blend as well. The kneaded eraser blended the colors into blotches that were not as white as the rubber eraser, but not smooth and cloudy like the cotton blender.
process and structure 