Drapery

This week's task was to complete an observational drawing of a drapery still life. This was a new challenge for me as I had never tried drawing a still life of drapery on its own. There were a lot of different elements to drawing fabric as I found when watching the video. All the different folds that could make up a drapery composition were something I wanted to include in my piece. I originally set up my composition with various objects under the blanket in order to create some interesting dimensions and folds. I then went on to create some thumbnail sketches of a few compositions that I had made when setting up my still life. I added the types of fold and lighting on the blanket before choosing one to take forward. When choosing my final one, I wanted to make sure that it had a wide variety of folds and interesting shapes which I could attempt to represent within my work. I was keen to attempt drawing some of the different drapes showcased in the video. It was also interesting to see how the drapery reacted with the objects underneath it. I placed a bowl and a box along with some cushions below so that I could see the fabric on a rounded plane, a sharp plane and a soft plane. I wanted my still life to look as dynamic as possible. 

I found this task quite challenging as there was a lot to think about in terms of how each fold reacted off one another and how light also reacted with the fabric. The fabric I was using was slightly pearly and also quite light but I had a nice light course hitting it so it produced some good depth within the centre of the piece. I think the downside of this piece was how central my composition ended up looking. I think I could have drawn it from a different perspective instead of from straight on. Next time, I would maybe move to the side so that I could get a better perspective angle to draw from. Before I received some feedback, my piece also looked very flat as you can see from the image below. I hadn’t focused enough on the depth of the set up and only about the fold and how they reacted to each other rather than as a piece of fabric as a whole with the light source. I improved that to make the final piece which you can see at the start. I blended in some more tones with a blending stump to create a softer and darker feel to some areas.