In week 4 we focused on colour. We could choose what colourful medium we wanted to use and I chose coloured pencils and pens. Colour theory is a very complex topic and while I don’t know all about it, I have a solid understanding of basic colour relationships and how to use colours to effect the mood of a piece. This diagram shows a range of different relationships that can be used.
The first activity was a warmup with lots of quick 1 to 2 minutes sketches, just focusing on getting the figure accurate. For this I just chose random colours as there wasn’t time to consider the effects of them in this task.
Here are a selection of slightly longer poses which gave me more time to get a more accurate sketch of the figure. I can definitely see improvement in my sketching from this session to the first week.
The next 2 pages are both more detailed with some tone and facial features included. For each figure I used 2 colours, 1 for the construction lines/framework and another for the tone and outline. I used a range of sets, some being different shades of the same colour, some complementary and some contrasting.
I really enjoyed this page as it was fun to experiment with different styles of sketching using colour. The blue one in the top left is the same style as the previous pages but with biro. For the pink one next to it I drew the outline of the figure first the used a purple pencil to lightly sketch in the shadows. The green one was particularly fun and challenging as I did no framework or outline and just sketched the shadows. The red and yellow one was an outline with the lightest bits shown with the yellow. For the one next to that I used 2 different co lours for the shadows and highlights. And the last one is a negative space sketch where I focused on the silhouette.
I really enjoyed this session because I love to work with colour and I’m feeling a lot more confident with figure drawing as I can see significant improvement from week to week of the module.
Samuel Green Illustration 