For the past couple months we have been working on a unit about line drawing. As our summative task we were required to create a final, well planned line drawing to show shape, texture and tone that must include a foreground, middle ground, and background. For my case, I have been completing my piece based on the pictures gathered during field study we had last year. Overall, my drawing is a landscape, the sky and mountains in the background, a lake in the middle, and some sandy areas and a cherry blossom tree as the foreground.

My artwork:

I have been practicing using line techniques since from the first unit, which was the field study visual journal unit, for example I often used lots of hatching and stippling. But now I know that back then, it was only little I knew about line techniques. Throughout this unit, I have concentratively tried to continue exploring different tonal values of colors. This has allowed me to express dark and light areas more freely just only with lines. I also have gained more knowledge about different types of line techniques. Just more than simply hatching and stippling, I also learned about cross-hatching, grain textures, reflection on a water, waves, and other line techniques that might require extremely advanced skills. This taught me the skill to use appropriate line techniques in appropriate conditions and situations.

If I was to recreate this piece, I would definitely once again look upon and improve the whole section surrounding the border line between the lake and the sandy area because in reality, in the lake as the border line comes closer, the sandy area should start being visible even when it has water on top of it. So I think I was not quite yet able to fully express the sight. I also think I am not good at drawing rocks only with lines. I hope, in the near future, I can express the unstableness and the unsteadiness of rocks. I consider that this will affect the piece an extremely large scale. It is just small details but these bits and bits of details will make the artwork even better.

While completing this piece, I had faced many problems so in the other there must be some solutions for them. So, I have thought of some strategies that might help reduce these problems.
1. Think of spacing – This strategy goes for people who have pieces like mine, where there are layers that has many gaps and spaces in it (for example, my very top layer, the cherry blossom tree). Most people tend to think that it is meaningless to have any drawings underneath those layers, but actually I think it is extremely crucial to have them, because they create some atmosphere of the scene in the piece. This helps audiences’ understandings of what the piece might be about.
2. Use pens that have different thicknesses – This simply adds an effect where your piece looks more realistic. It prevents your piece from looking flat like a set of 2D shapes.
3.  Follow the rule of thirds – Everyone who does art should know the rule of thirds. It is a rule (not necessarily a rule) that indicates the thirds of each vertical and horizontal sides are great places to draw objects, because it makes the piece balanced out and stable.

In conclusion, this unit was very enjoyable, it had clear strategies and methods unlike other art units that I actually found it fun and also thought I might get used to after a few weeks. I am fairly proud of my final piece, I think all of my study has shown up on it. I would like to say a big thank you to Mr. Curkovic for teaching me a such great art unit. Lastly I hope I can apply my art techniques I have gained from this unit for some other subjects. That would be great because this indicates art’s relation with other subjects. And I do think every subject has some kind of a similarity with others. Anyways, overall this line drawing unit was an extremely enjoyable one.

Thank you for reading!!!