Exercise 2 Part 1: Calm

I was apprehensive approaching this exercise coming from a more comic/cartoon approach to drawing trying something abstract like capturing emotion in a drawing is very much outside my comfort zone. I did,however, sign up for this course to improve my drawing and widen my experience of it so I steeled myself and boldly struck out into the unknown. The first emotion I decided to tackle was “Calm” with very mixed results.

Once I engaged with the feeling decided on what calm meant to me. A gentle smooth focus like a wave no sharp corners.  I chose a charcoal stick, stick and ink, a sharpie marker, and a soft pastel as my tools for this assignment.  In the main I believe I achieved this except for the stick and ink drawing which left me feeling anything but calm as I had precious little control over the tool I was using to apply the ink so gentle curves were out of the question. I decided to change my interpretation of calm to mean a single dot of focus in a sea of chaos…I don’t think it works very well but I did learn that a new medium can force you by it’s very nature to reinterpret your ideas. I was happiest with the charcoal and pastel drawings as It allowed me to introduce soft tones into the work and to me soft (soft not weak) is another facet of calm.

Apart from the sharpie this is the first time for decades that I have used materials other than a pencil or pen and ink …it was fun.

I think I’ll tackle Anger next.