Reflection: Drawing

After the drawing workshop, I am writing this blog to reflect the work I have made by thinking about the following questions.


- How have you chosen to interpret and approach the workshop/ set experiments?

I have experimented all exercises at the beginning. Some of them were new experiences for me; to consider what can these materials teach, what do I enjoy the most, and what did I miss before, etc. The reason why I didn't choose only one to do is if I keep doing something I used to, then I will not able to discover new things and cannot explore my creativity. After the first experiment, I'd like to choose one section that I most interested in. This specific section might process into something else that I can keep exploring it. In the end, I have chosen 'draw to music'.

- Describe what have you done.

The aim of this exercise was to get out of the box so that I decided not to draw too carefully. I would like to do this exercise as experiments. I prepared 14 papers for this two-weeks exercise. Then I chose different types of music, for instances, classic, pop, rap. I repeated the music ten times to let myself understand the music. After that, pictures of a story or some geometry, lines, or colours might come up in my mind.


- Which materials have you experimented with and why?

I used pencils, fine-liners, ink pens, and watercolour. I used a pencil at the beginning which I pretend to make mistakes that I was drawing carefully. Then I wanted to make harder lines; I tried different sizes of fine-liners and also applied colours by ink pens. Apart from experiment lines, I used watercolour to draw larger images. I would like to use a variety of materials to provide textures. Refer to the artist research, I wanted to use watercolour to create some vivid pattern like Julie Mehretu's art.


- Which processes have you experimented with and why?

I tried to get marks from some rocks, branches and leaves, which I applied black dust on the paper by using charcoal sticks. I want to use natural material wisely into my artwork. However, it was not very successful that the charcoal layer was too thin that I could not get clear marks from those objects.


- What do you consider to be successful in what you have done? What makes it successful?

I think it is the right decision to listen to the music several times. It allows me to understand it better. Also, I have seen the meaning of the words to know what is the song about. These actions led me to be more clear on what to draw.

- What do you consider to be failures? What makes it a failure?

I think the only barrier is I was not bold enough. I follow the steps as usual: make a draft, think about it deeply, then draw it, erase it, draw it again. I made things too carefully that I might lose a chance to develop ideas.

- What has surprised you in the work?

One exercise is to draw a bike from memory. I only can draw it from one angle. I shocked that it reminds me that something we see every day, it doesn't mean we remember it. It is all about observation, the human mind sometimes lies to ourselves, we think we know what is it looks like, however, it's not. That's the reason why we can draw it with a picture but not from memory.

- What will you pick up to develop further and how? 

I will develop the music drawing further. I think Julie Mehretu's drawings give me a lot of inspirations that I would like to explore more pattern making using the media as she uses in her works.