Gardens of the future

Brush pens aren't something I'm particularly confident at using so recently I have been practicing using them more. I love the way you can create texture just by varying line weight. However, I am struggling to get used to how steady and confident I need to be with my strokes. I will try to use brush pens to create a landscape next and see if I prefer it.   

 Above is a fountain pen sketch I did of a building at Francis Close Hall. I had never used a fountain pen for drawing before but I really enjoyed it. I think the fluidity of it is definitely preferable to a biro, however it's hard to get the same smudgy effect. I will definitely be trying different techniques using this pen in the future. 

I love using coloured pens for observational drawing. I think adding colour really brings the drawing to life and the tip of crayola supertips allows me vary my line weight. However, you can't mix new colours with felt pens so my colour palette is limited. This makes it hard for drawing scenes that have lots of varying tones of the same colour, such as the third image.   

  To improve our confidence using Photoshop 'Bucket Fill' we were assigned to bucket fill this landscape. I hadn't realised before this that I would be able to bucket fill my own hand sketches in Photoshop. This is definitely something to consider for future assignments. We were asked to use the pointillism feature to make the roof of the building blue, I completed this part of the task and the didn't like the look of it so I decided to play with generative fill to make me a roof. Generative fill definitely comes up with some quirky ideas and it took me a few attempts but I enjoy the outcome as I think the roof I chose suits the style of the surrounding drawing. 

  SketchUp is something I haven't used frequently on this course. We very briefly touched on it in my first year but after my summer work experience at Andy Sturgeon Designs I feel my CAD knowledge is where I am really lacking so I am trying to improve this. I chose a Japanese themed garden because I really wanted to create a modern style koi pond. I really enjoyed creating this garden on SketchUp and I feel much more confident in my ability now. 

This was a task set by one of my lecturers to experiment with using different media. I have used a lot of varied medias before however, I have never thought to use them while replicating the same image. This is a really useful tool at seeing what works well and the different t style each media gives your work. I think my favourite is the continuous line drawing. I've never done continuous line drawing for a landscape before, this is something I definitely want to try to incorporate into future observational studies.