ILLU5040 - Wild Life Drawing

Research & Inspiration

Lynne Chapman - Personal Sketchbook Works

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Lynne Chapman is a contemporary British artist who focuses on in-the-moment illustrations of life, aiming to capture an essence of events within her drawings.

I find the sketchy look of these illustrations very appealing, key lines and forms are defined but there's an almost fuzzy effect that comes from lots of rough lines which seems to ground these works in reality a little bit more.

I like that the time constraints of doing life drawings in the world force artists to make looser, but more considered lines to achieve detail. There's an economy of speed and detail constantly at odds with each other, and the end results are often better off for it.

Don Low - Singapore Sketches (2018)

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Don Low is a contemporary Singaporean artist who sketches locations as a way to gain a greater, and perhaps often overlooked, understanding of them. Everyday sketching is a way to catalogue places and events, like a journal of images rather than words.

The limited colour pallets add to the atmosphere of these drawings with warmer or cooler tones being used.

Fading out the composition, only including interesting or important details could be one way of balancing time constraints, working almost radially from the focal point and deliberately omitting bland features of a scene.

Wild Life Drawing

From the various life drawings I've seen, many of them occur on public transport or in coffee shops. Those places aren't as populated, or sometimes even open at all anymore given our current situation regarding the global pandemic, so I'm faced with quite the challenge of finding life drawing subjects that are appropriate to the same sort of conditions one might face in those locations.

The fact that life goes on around an artist drawing in-situ contributes to the outcomes of that artist, as such whenever I need to use a substitute for real-life life drawing I will aim to use video footage rather than still photography, as I feel it would provide a more appropriate analogue.

Class Sketches

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As a quick warm up task we, as a class, sketched each other over the course of an hour. This task was challenging because we were all simultaneously drawing and being drawn at the same time, so there was plenty of movement going on.

Life Drawings

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Here's a collection of my life drawings, some from real life, some the product of dubious virtual life-drawing, all rough depictions of life in the moment.

I find drawing in the moment, without reference images or even a pencil sketch as a guide, forces me to capture an essence of something rather than a slavish recreation.

Carlisle Train Station Window

Carlisle Train Station Bench

Edinburgh Zoo has a live-feed camera in their Koala enclosure, so I was able to do a virtual life drawing of a Koala, they're ideal subjects for life drawing because they do not move very much.