GESTURE DRAWING

For this project I was assigned to combine materiality and representation using charcoal. What that means is I had to produce a drawing that was based of of something. That could be a physical thing or an emotion. I had to represent that in my piece. I then had to spend the week understand how charcoal behaves as a medium and use that to my advantage to create my representation. This is what I made.

I chose to learn more toward materiality than representation. My initial inspiration the small veiny texture I created by experimenting with rolling a block of charcoal around on a page covered in powder charcoal. Rather than the charcoal leaving a mark, it picked up the powder charcoal giving it a very unique texture. It reminding me of pebbles.

I used that to inspire what I would represent. I chose to represent a cracked, pebbled side walk that I walk past everyday on my way to class. Because I was more focused on materiality, I didn't worry about making my sidewalk realistic or even recognizable as a sidewalk. It is a close up view with the dark lines running across the drawing representing the cracks. I chose to leave the space around the cracks white because I like the high contrast since the cracks are the darkest things throughout the drawing.

Throughout the whole piece, I really enjoyed incorporation mistakes into the drawing rather than covering them up. I liked how to created variety and something truly unique. This piece was very tedious to make, but I am very pleased with the end result and had a lot of fun created an abstract representation of an overlooked sidewalk.