Week 4/5- Urban exploration

 

For weeks 4 and 5 we went to the abbey pumping station museum in order to draw on sight and create a final piece in the next week based of photographs and preliminary sketches we do on sight at the museum. I really enjoyed looking around and got many ideas for interior or exterior Victorian set ups that I could draw. For this weeks task I particularly wanted to do an interior piece as I don't have much experience drawing interior setups since I usually do landscapes. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and create a detailed piece focusing on life in the Victorian times. The museum was a perfect place to get started since there was a lot of interesting objects and rooms that I could form a composition around. I looked at a few ideas consisting of machinery and living room replica setups. I wanted to consider the mood of the scene I would be drawing and I wanted it to reflect how life would have been during that time and in the place in the scene. 

One of the most interesting interiors I visited was the laundry room recreation featuring a mangle, buckets and fabric along with a brick wall in the background. I really liked all the different textures and angles that were presented along with the interesting levels in position that the fabric helped create. I thought this would be a good interior to draw as part of the task for the next 2 weeks. I also felt like I could render in a high variety of details since the room had so much character. The focus on atmosphere and mood would also be present since the characterises of the room would allow me to consider this.

The other piece that I decided to look at was a living room interior featuring a wooden table with various Victorian object placed on it. However I did decide against this set up since I thought it lacked a sense of dimension and character compared to the laundry room where I could really focus and adding an atmosphere and mood to the drawing along with its dynamic range of layers and textures. 

I actually started drawing my final piece on sight at the museum as I was sure this was the scene that I wanted to create. I felt inspired by the amount of character it had an I felt that I could show a lot of skills an techniques. when starting my drawing I began by sketching out the placements of each objects in relation to one other and my preliminary sketch to ensure that my composition looked the way I wanted it to. This piece was very challenging to draw out since a lot of the smaller parts had different perspectives and very  complicated shapes. The mangle in particular took a long time to draw as accurately as I could. I have also found fabric to be complicated to shade so I will pay careful attention to how i can get the forms and line weights of it correct in order to enhance how convincing it is. 

I began shading it including as much detail as I could whilst also considering the tonal range of the piece. I wanted there to be a strong contrast and a clear definition of the materials such as the metal, brick and fabric. I was thinking about which aspects such have the lightest tonal ranges as this would create more interest to my piece. The objects towards the front of the piece have a much more defined line weight than those in the back I tried to knock back a lot of the tones and details in the bricks to add a steeper sense of perspective to it. I add a hard time establishing my light source as the light source in the museum was quite awkward on the objects themselves. I had to go over the shades a few times in order to create a sense of dimension and from my feedback more drop shadows were needed around the darker sides of the buckets.

Overall I spent a lot of time on this piece and I am happy with the outcome I was really hoping to present a clear and atmospheric Victorian interior based off the research from the museum and capture a lot of the fine details within each object. I wanted to try and emphasise line weight and tonal range along side an interesting composition as developed in my previous weeks of practise. I notice that perfectively it could be more accurate and I think I could create a better sense of depth by knocking back some of the further details however I am happy with the outcome. It is one of the better pieces that I have drawn.