Exercise: Description and Depiction

Brief

In this exercise you will consider how words play off against pictures, moving more firmly towards interpretation, message and meaning. Imagine yourself engaged in observational drawing activities.

This may be during a sketch outing, a life drawing session or while you are drawing family or friends in a relaxed scenario. How much of your own presence in the experience do you think comes through in your drawing and what is your intention when you draw? Are you a silent bystander or active participant? Are you looking to capture the objective reality of the situation or more a communication of how you see, feel and engage with the world? What obstacles might you encounter if you attempt to draw only with ‘verisimilitude’ by which I mean exactly, as real or as ‘true’ as the image in front of you?

Consider that: what you choose to draw, how you frame your image, the emotion and sensitivity of how you draw and the material language of what you draw with all affect the reading of the image and begin to imbue subjective authorial qualities into your work. It should make sense then, that the more actively you engage with the scenarios you are drawing through visual dialogues and conversations in your sketchbook, the more you will become aware of a sense of personal voice within your work and your own ability to respond creatively to the observed world. Leading on from the previous task, where you were working fast to fill up a whole sketchbook, your next task is a slower observational exercise where you will be considering description as a means of teasing out the simple narrative of the scene.

This will enable a jump between the observed and the authored. If you have restricted time to get your images down on paper, using words when sketching can be both a useful shorthand to ‘capture more’ of what you see and feel. This can also be a good way to start looking more deeply and creatively, engaging with the stories that you are implicitly ‘drawn to drawing’.

Don’t worry if you are nervous of writing - instead imagine that creative writing is just another visual process, in the same way that drawing is. If you don’t do it already you may find your drawn ideas are enriched by including words. The following task may help you to implement this as a focused part of your process.

You should undertake this task in a space that interests you, where some slow activity or movement is taking place. If it helps, you may want to research some of your favourite paintings or illustrated scenes and discuss what you like about these in your log and seek out a similar sort of space.

The exercise!

I decided, since I was so calm to do the scene ahead of me, the front of my house, it has a huge field and when the sun sets it's beautiful! There were birds chirping, someone was walking past. Beautiful sunset with clouds, very picturesque!

Slightly colouring the final frame...

Not entirely necessary but I wanted to convey the beautiful colours of the sky, I tried it digitally this time just colouring on top of the sketch...

Questions

• Which approaches did you enjoy and which will you take forward from this task?

I surprisingly liked the writing aspect of this exercise, I used to write when I was little and revisiting writing was really fun! I also liked breaking down what I could hear and some key elements of what was going on in front of me as it helped me see what was more important; when it came to the sketch I made sure to create darker/longer shadows-- which is also why I wanted to add a colourized version of the last panel since the colourful skies was key to the moment.

• What happened when words and images interacted; did they reinforce or play off against each other?

When words and images interacted it created a narrative, and in this case a poetic narrative to what the moment was. Reinforcing the two together...

• Did describing the scene using words first affect the way you drew afterwards?

Completely, usually I would be so overwhelmed with what to start of with in the sketch and make everything important to the sketch-- making it lack composition and balanced. This way I was able to pick apart what elements was more important i.e. lamppost, long shadows, sun, skies and trees.

• Did what you described using words help you to decide the emphasis or your image?

It did help, it made me create better contrasts in shadows and create an emphasis on colour in the sky.

Evaluation

This exercise was a simple exercise but a relaxing one, it was really nice to explore writing in a sketchbook and exploring the combination of writing and sketch. It was a great way of breaking down what makes that moment and would influence my work in the right direction with a better outcome.

I rarely write in my sketchbook, only if I had an event or to caption some sketches, however, I really love the idea of longer writing with sketches as I feel like it could give me some really good ideas for comics or illustrations.

Next time, I would like to try a setting where it has lots of people, similarly to the time I went to Comic Con London (May).