Bird Drawings & Photocopies

 

I've done a lot of loose pen and watercolour sketches recently so I wanted to do something different this time. I used a soft graphite pencil to draw a magpie and a crow and instead of the usual fluid continuous line I did a lot of short bold lines to build up the feathery texture in a more naturalistic way to my pen drawings. The other drawing on the page is my test building with some paper flowers inside, but I wasn't interested in finishing it so I moved onto drawing birds instead, and it gives an unusual composition.

I made some photocopies with different colours so I could try different ways of re-working the piece..

In the black and white copy I painted some squares of colour like I did with my line drawings because I found those quite visually appealing, and I did a kind of gradient beginning with the turquoise magpie colour down to the black representing the crow. I think it brings the drawings together and creates a juxtaposition of organic and geometric shapes. The watercolour bled outside of the boxes which I had sectioned off with masking tape and I think it gives a sense of energy and rawness the colour refused to be contained.

This version is like an opposite of the previous one, with black and white squares and turquoise birds in the foreground. The background is a photocopy from my sketch book and I like how the grid arrangement mirrors the ceramic buildings that I made , while the unnatural colour of the birds gives a sense of artificiality linking to the project theme.

This is personally my favourite re-working with the black and white copies placed against a muted colour palette from when I was doing my pigeon drawings. There is a nice contrast between the washy bleeding watercolours and the assertive pencil marks which I really like

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