Exercise 1 & 2- Marking marks with pencils and creating tone
I found this exercise very difficult if I am honest…I found it frustrating and ended up just scribbling everywhere basically. After chiding myself – I had another go … I realise that every exercise is important and it reflects badly on me that I had difficulty applying myself. It did serve as a good warm up however.
Exercise 3 – Alternative methods and materials for making marks
I love using scrap materials so I pulled out all the paper from the recycling and kindling basket by the fire. I also found my old typewriter to see what marks could be achieved with that…(not many as ribbon needs replaced it turns out). Using twigs, slate, shell and stones that I found on the shore i persevered – the only issue with these was that they do not hold the paint like a brush- therefore you need to keep applying more and more as the lines fade out quickly.
Exercise 4
Wax Crayons…..I hate wax crayons… so much that I couldn’t bring myself to buy any at the local Spar (I put them back prior to payment), and instead resorted to stealing a plastic pot of decaying fat crayons from my neices. I have a new technique for working with materials or on subject matter that does not appeal to me: – I keep doing it until it does… I find that with perserverence that one can learn to love any material or find some good qualities within it. In the case of the wax crayons – I dislike getting really dirty or using very basic primary colours (fear of producing little more than a childish scribble?) . However…after a bit of layering and quite a lot of pressure from my upper body to get the crayon to release its colour – I started to notice attractive qualities. Although the inks painted on top (wax resist) did not really seem to work – I thought the layers of colour and the scratchy tones were impressive. I would apply the same theory to the whole theme of ‘Making marks’ – at first it seemed just a warm exercise to loosen one up…but now after pondering it and researching it – I realise that it is an art movement in itself. Although all categories of drawing and painting could technically be referred to as ‘mark making’ – the technique of creating work based’ around marks’, e.g. Cy Twombly, (rather than accurate reproduction of reality ‘using marks’ e.g. the English Romantic painter John Constable) is what the terminology actually means to me now.
I guess I also felt some hesitation in making rubbings… I remember going around the Edinburgh botanical gardens as a child and furiously rubbing away at the bark on the trees – and proudly presenting a crumbled, half torn piece of paper back to my teacher. For this exercise I chose a red watercolour pencil which has a slightly softer tip than a regular colouring pencil. I restricted myself to the house and 10metres around it so as not to get carried away. Unsurprisingly, after approaching wood, rock and stone – I found myself inorexibly drawn to leaves.. there is a reason children are taught to take rubbings of leaves – they display a wonderful skeleton.
The last suggestion in exercise 4 is to make a collage using scraps of paper. I was totally at a loss of what to do…short of copying the exercises by Gwen Hedley in ‘Drawn to Stitch’. One thing I am attempting to do with these exercises – is to not buy anything new..(very hard) – so I just keep returning to the waste paper basket for materials. This ‘collage’ (if it could be called that ?) took 5 minutes using an old envelope and a box of matches at the last minute to create the burns. I think the burning could be my favourite discovery in making marks…
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