Rockin' the docks!

Second week of the course. We visited Bristol on Tuesday and went drawing around the M Shed docks. I'd been there before, so it wasn't a total breath of fresh air, but I did get some good work done. We were lucky enough to spot the Matthew, a ship which I have always wanted to draw because of my interest in 17th-19th century vessels (like the Victory, which I have also visited down in Portsmouth). In each of the studies I created, I wanted to give a sense of age whilst keeping an industrial feel to suggest the strength that the objects I drew once had in their everyday use (particularly the cranes around the M Shed). To do this, I chose, in accordance with the brief, to work mainly in black and white, which gave my drawings a foggy, smoky feel. However, in order to show that there was still some life (and indeed a lot of history) in these objects, I employed the same method as with Birnbeck Pier, injecting sparse amounts of bright colour into the pieces (all present in real life, like the rust accents on the banana crane and the sand-green controls in the dockyard crane cabins). This also helped to convey some realism, like with the fading tan paint of the "#31 crane" sign.

 My landscape piece for this area was drawn totally from memory using a combination of oil pastels, charcoal and 2B pencil. I was struggling to "feel" my artwork towards the beginning of the drawing because it lacked a certain something - the cranes felt too simple, the sky was looking too white and the area that I wanted to portray as water beneath Pero's Bridge looked far too solid. Taking a moment (and putting on my earphones to Norah Jones), I thought back to my previous drawing of the Birnbeck Pier and suddenly realised what I was missing. I grabbed the charcoal and began working on the skyline, trying to remember certain buildings (like St. Mary Redcliffe church) and inventing others, all whilst throwing their real-life positions to the wind. With the skyline finished off with some dark grey pastel to give some definition, the landscape suddenly looked complete and everything seemed to fit. Needless to say I was very pleased with how this one turned out!