My tutor suggested an excercise as a way to learn about character design. His method was to go and draw stuffed animals, drawing parts of different creatures together in the same image. I thought that I would try this in our local museum. I like to draw what I see, but this was a way of drawing without being quite so literal. It was a useful excercise. I also had to draw a badger and deer for a wee project. I will have to think about where I go from here.....

Lino day

Have tried to do some Lino cutting today. This is something I haven't attempted since school, so I am clearly a novice here, ancient as I am! I enjoyed it. I cut the Lino twice so that I had two tones of green with white. It is meant to be those plants that are in hedgerows everywhere at the moment. If Google is to be believed, then they are called; umbelliferae.

I went painting on wotton hill today....it was very hot!

Handed in my work....now for a new project!

I am still looking at black and white illustration as research for my essay. This has the result of making me try things out, and avoid any writing.

Thinking about an essay at the moment. I am trying to write about key elements of black and white image making and so I put off reading to do some drawing.....I did notice how at one point the buildings were a lighter tone than the background hills but as the sunlight got brighter the tone of the buildings got much darker than the background. I thought this was interesting and then read about monets haystacks and how he painted them in different lights, and what this then created. It made me think how we perceive things as having a colour that is constant, but actually this is a fallacy and it is always dependent on the light and reflections around.

Have not posted anything for a few weeks but I have been working hard, on structure and story telling....however this is not producing images for my blog but have a double page spread, that I think is getting there. ( I will probably continue to tweak for a further hundred years. I am finding that illustration is a time absorbing activity). Happy Easter x