I’ve been working up to my third assignment in the Drawing module of my OCA course and, after going a few rounds with townscapes and statues, may have found a home under a flyover again.

First there was this, albeit rather more painting than drawing although those seem now to be interchangeable, a scene I pass by quite often along the river bank.

Then these A4 sketches (the first of these three is the monochrome photo – mine – I used to map out the shapes)

 

And then, much larger A2 sized monochrome and full colour versions.

You can blame the psychedelia on an unexpectedly retrieved page full of Kandinsky images when googling something else.

The next step was to cover the drawing with tracing paper and pick out the detail without too much regard for the overall image.

Which gave rise to this and goodness me but glue makes this stuff crinkle.

Right now, it’s flat on its back* having the detail of its detail picked out in white ink with a view to, possibly, using black ink and some tiny tickles of colour in other spaces.

 

Now with Winsor and Newton black ink layered onto two panels. At the moment, I think I prefer the white ink only panels but we’ll see. I’ll do the additional work on the left panels to see if that pops them back up the ‘like’ scale. It needs to be upright again so I can get a good look.

14th May and I’ve detailed the left side panels but not the right and i’m leaving it there because I like the counterbalance of heavy black patches and immediacy of impact against the barely visible white on white-ish of the other panels. I could argue something about the impact of motorways and A roads – heavy duty beasts that keep us in line when we’re on them, inflict themselves on people when they’re built at the bottom of their garden, but that only the graffiti artists inhabit in those lower reaches. I won’t though because that’s only just occurred to me! The abstractions come from the original drawings during which the move towards rendering the foliage as quasi-graffiti forms led to a focus on the shapes making up the whole rather than the whole itself.

 Might have been clever to get my signature in line. Also – how do you iron cartridge paper?

 

*Easel that allows horizontal plane is a Loxley Essex from Ken Bromley