The last assignment taught me much about using sketchbooks to acquire first-hand research. I learned to draw people and places on site, use photographs to both document and to use as direct reference and inspiration, and how to later modify those initial drawings and notes to create a final product that aligns with my brief.

I find that I enjoy drawing outside, and I endeavor to do so weekly from now on, even if I do not have a specific project in mind when doing so. I also plan on improving my photography skills. While the photos I took were serviceable, there is much room for improvement to be made. From now on, when I notice something interesting and I do not have my sketchbook, I will take a photo with my phone and do my best to make it a good photograph, instead of just a means to an end.

In the tutor report, my tutor remarked that the end product of  my assignment was varied, but not coherent. I confess that coherency had not been a priority when I put it together. In this next assignment I will try to make the illustrations more stylistically congruent. And lastly, my tutor has also noted that my analysis of other artists’ artwork tends to lack depth, and the practical aspect of how their art informs my own practice. I will do my best from now on to ask questions such as: What? How? and Why? as in What colors do they use? What materials and techniques? What are their lines like? What was the goal? How did they achieve this? How are they similar to other artists? Why did they make this? Why did they choose to communicate in this way? Why did they eliminate/add this? Why do I like it/dislike it? and of course, What have I learned? How can I apply this?

This exercise is all about jotting down ideas. The challenge was to go to a single event and fill an entire (small) sketchbook with drawings of people, things, or impressions from that event. I chose to visit the student exhibition of our local university. I did not have a sketchbook in the appropriate size, so I quickly cut up and sowed together a few different types of paper with varying thicknesses and textures, and covered it up with some patterned paper for the cover.

The rules were that I had to fill up the entire sketchbook in one sitting and try to also fill up the pages themselves. I had to quickly document all types of things I saw, including scenes or just textures. At least two pages had to be entirely covered, showing no white of the paper. And I was to make a two page spread when I hit the center of the sketchbook.

The materials that I brought with me were: the sketchbook, colored pencils, a waterbrush and a small set of watercolors, graphite pencils, pens and a few markers.

The texture of a honeycomb sculpture and two short studies from ink portraits

The exhibition was very informal, the entry was free, most of the art on the walls was frameless and there were sketchbooks and loose art pieces strewn and piled up on various surfaces in the exhibition hall. There were remnants of previous exhibitions in either sculptures or odd pieces of vintage printing machinery. So there was plenty of interesting stuff to choose from, subject matter wise.

The two page spread. A girl who joined me in sketching

A quick study of a abstract painting. A girl before the paintings

The way out and a window form the outside

An arts student waiting for their taxi

Filling the whole sketchbook in a single go was a challenge, to say the least. At first, I just drew whatever I saw in front of me, but a few drawings in I was starting to struggle because I felt I was running out of options. But it turns out I only needed to push past that phase, because as soon as I wasn’t looking only at the walls around me, which were the main part of the event, I started seeing other things like the piles of artwork, the mismatched chairs and the view of the outside seen from within. I did my best to branch out from the literal objects in front of me like the heaters, chairs and subject matter of the art on the walls, and depicted the things around me a little more abstractly, like painting the whole wall of artwork in square splashes and observing the texture an color of the floor.

This exercise made me take a step back and use a new way to analyze the world around me when making observational drawings. I first had to sit and observe the world around me, describe it using words, and then finally draw the scene. I first drew four identical rectangles in my sketchbook using my identification card (a credit card would be a bit too small), and then I drew some lines to write on in the first rectangle. I took some time to find a scene I could draw and a bench to sit on because I would be staying in the same place for a while. When I found the ideal place, I simply observed for a while without writing or drawing. I tried to observe things other than the buildings, people or vehicles in front of me, like sounds our smells.

After thus observing, I wrote down what I could see and hear.

“Notes of the day: I’m sitting behind the church in Unirii Square and this is what I see. I see cobblestones beneath my feet and another bench next to me. There’s a street sign next to it. I see a crosswalk just where the square turns into another street, and it beeps every time the light turns green. The buildings around me are old, some renovated, some not. Three are plenty of trees around and there’s a bicycle tied before the crosswalk.”

I am not pleased with this paragraph in the least, but it is precisely what I wrote down when I was sitting on that bench. After I finished writing, I drew some perspective lines for each other square. On the second square, I only described the scene in keywords by placing the word where the object would be drawn. In the third square, I drew the scene without using any words and in the fourth, I used a mixture of drawing and writing out the words.

I found writing out helped very little for most of the drawing, I think that I would have rather just stuck to drawing the scene as I do usually. The thing I would concede it helped with is open up my observation to the rest of my senses like smell or sound. Smell or sound cannot be drawn, but I could write down “Beep” for the sounds the crosswalk light makes when it’s green, and if I had felt inclined, I could have written down the fact that the street smelled of car exhaust and that I could also smell the evergreens behind me.

An easy way to get an idea of how storyboarding would be done is to analyze and reverse-engineer scenes from films. I chose to analyze two scenes from the Thor: Ragnarock movie. The first page was a failed experiment in how to place my panels, but on my second page I managed to create evenly fitting squares that could easily be followed without being numbered.

The first scene I chose was the “Death of the Allfather” . It is an interesting scene, especially in comparison with the rest of the film, because it is a very sober, calm scene at the beginning of a rather over-the-top, explosively colorful story. This calm sobriety is reflected in the wide shots, static compositions using a lot of sweeping horizontal lines of the Norway coast, and close up shots of the characters’ faces. It is also reflected in the colors, the grey skies and subdued green of the grass, and in the costume of the characters, or rather the non-costumes. Unlike in any other part of this film, or any film before, these characters are not dressed like comic book characters, or medieval gods, but rather in modern, regular clothing. The Allfather himself is wearing beige and pink, a subdued version of his usual color palette in steel grey and royal red. Thor, the main character, wears layers of greys and a teal sweatshirt in a more toned-down version of the uniform he wares later in the movie. And Loki, the black sheep of the family, wears the most formal suit of all of them in a sleek, modern cut, all in black.

The scene is not exactly at the beginning of the story, but it is the Inciting Incident. The death of Thor’s father not only sets him on his quest symbolically, but also very literally because once the Allfather dies, the magic, binding the villain of the story, Hela the goddess of death, falls apart allowing her to step out of her thousand-year imprisonment.

Despite the fact that this is a death scene, it is not meant to be grieving, but melancholy. As the Odin, the Allfather, speaks with his two sons about what is taking place, and the fact that he must go, the scenery around them is peaceful because of some very deliberate decisions on the part of the director. The skies are grey, yes, but they are not solid and depressing because it looks like the clouds are parting just after the storm is finished, rather than looking like it is about to rain. This context is meant to show that Odin is at peace, embracing death with open arms and anticipating the reunion with his wife, Frigga. He is not waiting for the end, but for a new beginning.

Again, the wide angles showing the endless sea that is always positioned in front of the characters, or the expanse of grass behind them, are meant to express peacefulness and not depression. The characters are either positioned in such a way that they are very small on the screen, showing them looking out. Or the camera is positioned very closely and personally in order for us to see the expressions on their faces as they, the two sons, have a last conversation with their dying father.

In the last part of the scene, when Odin vanishes and his golden ashes are carried by the wind, the camera focuses on the glowing dust motes, then on Thor’s face and his sorrow, then on both him and Loki as they look out towards the endless sea where the wind took their father. The peaceful sense persists for about a second, then Thor’s anger and sorrow is manifested in the sky by the darkening of the previous peaceful clouds, predominantly on his side of the screen rather than Loki’s, then the camera closes in on Thor’s fist as sparks of lighting surround it.

The next scene I chose was much less philosophical and I simply drew it to get a better understanding of pacing and how the characters are placed on the screen. I drew the scene where Thor steps out into the gladiatorial tournament just before he starts fighting the Hulk. A thing that I already knew, but was emphasized as I kept drawing, is the fact that the focal point of the scene tends to always be somewhere on the third of the composition. As in, if the screen were to be sectioned in three, the focal point would be on one of the lines. That is, unless it is an especially grand and important moment, when the focal point is right on the center of the screen. But this is just a regular rule of composition. Similarly, when characters are moving forward somewhere, they are always moving from left to right (because that is how we write in the west and therefore going from left to right subconsciously indicates progression), conversely, if they are moving backward they would move from right to left on the screen.

Another interesting thing to analyze was the way they presented the scene using closeups and wide panning. They started at a midway point fairly close to the door Thor would come out from, and then kept coming closer so that we could see his fighting gear and facial expression while he processes the scene before him, then the camera moves away from him to focus widely on the audience around him (the camera shifted to what Thor was looking at). Then the two previous things are combined by the moving of the camera behind Thor, so that we could both see him, the audience and the arena. Next, the camera moves even farther away until Thor is nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle (at the third, actually) of the giant circle arena. Lastly the camera moves close once again, this time to the door opposite of Thor, indicating that it is where the next Challenger would be coming from, then we see Thor’s reaction to this by moving the camera even closer to his face.

It is an interesting pattern of moving closer and closer and then farther and farther to and from the subject matter in order to show both the character and the context effectively.

In this exercise, I had to re-interpret my previous drawings using implied narrative. Meaning, I looked at my sketches and simply asked what the characters could be thinking or saying. For this exercise I chose to write over two of my sketches in Photoshop.

For the first one, I added a question coming off from the outside of the composition, as if the main character could hear someone ask “But..why are they naked?”.  A rather frustrating question for many artists. The character chooses to say nothing and simply sigh.

In the second drawing, I reinterpreted the characters not as two portraits on a page, but as two characters conversing. The lady looked rather annoyed with the character drawn almost entirely in shadow, and for some reason I interpreted this as a scene where the second character is trying to sell her something obviously useless… I honestly don’t know what to think of this one.

This was a fun exercise, but I am not sure how I could use it in my work in any way but to mock my own art. Which is entertaining, but not necessarily useful, I think. Other than perhaps taking a step back and analyzing what the easiest message read from the drawing, and if that message is not what I intend it to be, or can be easily spun another way, then it might be a good idea to re-think the composition.

This time instead of analyzing a moving image, I will try my best to create one. Or the steps of one at least.

I chose the last image in my small sketchbook, the one with the arts student and then drew it three times in the exact same pose it is in the original. Then all I did was change the location of the arm and of the trashcan and the size of the smoke cloud in the rest of the images in order to suggest the fact that they are putting out the cigarette.

For the next image, I chose one of my perspective studies from previous pages. This time, instead of drawing three close moments in time, I drew tree moments in time which are far apart. I drew the basic composition three times on a long piece of paper, and rendered the one in the middle, what I would call the image in the Present, the same way as the original. Then the drawing on the left, I called the Past, and changed the dress of the characters to something that would not look out of place 100 years ago, and also changed the buildings in the distance and added a horse-drawn carriage. I chose to eliminate the trees as well, since the ones in the original are still young. Then for the last drawing, dubbed Future, I changed the buildings in the distance again, created some odd clothing for the characters, I eliminated the vehicle part of the road completely and drew flying cars and stoplights above the buildings.

This was a very useful exercise, and it is one I will utilize in the future when conceiving new illustrations. It helped me think of the illustration as a real thing that can shift and change like a scene in a movie or like a play. It is a place where a story can really happen and it can move like it’s alive. Somehow this gives much more freedom for creativity than being presented with a white page and told that “anything can happen on there”. Thinking of an image in this way gives an anchor point from where the possibilities are not just endless, but within grasp.