Anju's Blog

 Past 12 weeks ago in ART class we started a new unit called “Make You Mark“. This unit is about line drawing to see how we show the tone, texture, light source, value and more by line techniques for example stipple, cross hatching, etc using only Sharpie (black). My drawing have mountains and lake at the background, rocks at middle ground  and dog and a brach was at foreground. Our unit question is How can we communicate visually? and the significant concept is Line can be used to convey shape, texture and tone.

First we learnt different line techniques that we could use for our drawing.  When we felt comfortable using line techniques we started to draw a practice drawing, it had a field, pile of rocks, trees and a hill. I used stipple, scumble, lines, uneven circles etc. The progress I made is the trees and mountains because for my practice one my mountain didn’t have any textures so it looked very flat and the trees looked like popcorn. But using a technique called succumbing it shows the mountains and trees realistic and shows the texture. Comparing my final drawing and my practice one, I think I’ve done better because I practiced and tested more in my house. The parts that I want to improve on is the water ripple and the open space of the lake because the ripple looks unrealistic, I think I used too bold lines for ripples so it looks unrealistic and I could of used more line techniques to fill up the space of the lake rather than just simple dash line reflection/shadow of water.
Some part of my drawing is influenced by Van Gogh. My picture had a bush at the background and I didn’t know what kind of line technique I should use to draw. I flipped some pages of Van Gogh’s Line Drawing book that was in ART class and I found this curvy lines. I thought it would be nice to use this technique for my bush because from my perspective it really shown the texture of the bush and it also shown the tone, more curvy lines = dark and less = lighter.
Another area that I should improve is I should of  researched more before I started to draw my final piece. This effected my time management because I wasted my time deciding the line techniques and I think 2 of the lessons when my classmates were already starting to draw with sharpies I was still researching what kind of line techniques I should use.
Overall comparing my practice ones and my final piece. It showed my progress and improvement of using the line techniques the right way.  It was a stressing unit but at the same time it was interesting to learn different line techniques and looking at different artist’s line drawing.