Referring to your and others’ installations, and your observational drawings make a minimum of five drawings (no bigger than A4) which explore and sensitively consider mark making, composition, scale, shape, texture, pattern, tone, line, mass etc. using the following media: ink (black or blue), black fine liner, black marker, charcoal, rubber, masking tape.

1. A warm-up before getting into it, essentially another of the “See you, see me” drawings – 10 mins, no look, 9B, 2H and rubber (not the set media for “Drawing for Drawing’s Sake”) – most focused and interesting drawing so far, but needed to think hard about why – the rubber was the last tool I used and as a result made the biggest mark on the page (rubber and pencil competing with each other is interesting idea) – it was thickest of the tools used and was most forcefully applied – I keep leaning towards the rubber because so much of the composition is white (mirror frame, walls, radiator, text) – think the page may have been too small for what I was drawing – interesting how the annotations appear to push down on the text – following on from Alan’s suggestion it might be interesting to explore the presence of the text – the competition for space between what I’ve drawn and what I write about it, or their co-existence if I want to think about it as something complementary.
2. 10 mins, fine liner and marker, right hand, standing close to composition – looked at slide number 8 of previous task where I payed close attention to the folds of the fabric – I liked what I was doing with the fine liner, following the angles and hard lines of the folds and the frame of the mirror beneath – I didn’t add much with the marker – I tried using it to define darker areas and harder lines but it wasn’t effective.
3. 20 mins, marker, charcoal, rubber, sitting on the floor – wanted to consider composition here, and it’s situation in the space of my bedroom – to this point I had tried different ways to replicate the faint outline of the white frame beneath the fabric and I was happy with the effect created by lightly smudging the charcoal on my fingertips into the page and then lightly rubbing out the outline – I think there’s problems with the compositional relationship between each object e.g the shadow of the mirror falls at an unconvincing angle and so space is flattened – the angle of the radiator is not parallel with the wall – the rubber was effective at defining shadow lines – a few areas were left blank – one blank area makes it look like the radiator is floating – unsuccessful drawing since the intention was to focus on composition – for future drawings I should try paying attention to all areas of the composition and all areas of the page.
4. 20 min, Marker, charcoal, rubber, minimal looking at page, side approach – Previous drawing non-cohesive, perhaps looking at the page too often – intention here is to focus on line, shape, pattern and hopefully their combination will produce a convincing drawing – Was happy with it – chaotic but in a good way – the charcoal and rubber compete with each other, creating contrast and depth – I like the marker outlines of the half-legible letters – the mirror is a bit of a strange shape but the space underneath is the focal point – I notice that when I use charcoal intuitively, looking largely at the object drawn, the effects are stronger – also reminded myself that contrast in tone is important for creating space – this drawing looked stronger stood back, which I’m not doing as regularly in my room.
5. 20 mins, masking tape, charcoal, rubber – texture, mark-making, tone – not particularly happy with this one, maybe because I added in mirror frame after timer ended – I didn’t find the masking tape as suitable for replicating fabric as I expected – happy with angle of the mirror
6. Here I was testing out the masking tape a bit further and I think more successfully.
7. An interesting and accidental mirrored effect was created by heavily pressing charcoal onto the other side of the page for the next drawing – unintentional mark-making happens a lot with soft media like charcoal.
8. 15 mins, charcoal and rubber – My favourite of the “Drawing for Drawing’s Sake” developments – was happy with the carpet texture created with charcoal, finger and rubber – applying the edge of the charcoal and in repetitive horizontal lines was important for giving mirror impression – vertical lines applied for indicating the wall reflected in the mirror – using mark-making and horizontal and vertical lines to indicate space in the drawing – rubber was very effective for depicting the mirror frame, and thought I did well to recreate the arial perspective I had, standing over the composition, beginning them narrow at the floor and widening them as they rise up – interesting feature to have the lines of the previous page rub through: another example of accidental mark-making – because rubber and charcoal are quite thick tools some details were hard to replicate – I think this worked because I came at it from another angle, it isn’t overly complicated and I paid equal attention to mark-making, line, perspective, texture, shape, tone and composition.

A lot of these drawings have been from the same angle, try to get a bit more variety, be explorative.