I began my project focusing on Leicester as at the time of the start of this project, lockdown was still looming and we had to work from home wherever possible. This led me to the conclusion that I should focus on a place I have easy access to and that wouldn’t cause mw to get into trouble with the police or authorities.
At the start of my second year, I did a project focusing on Cornwall, paying close attention to my uses of colour and shapes. I thoroughly enjoyed that project and felt that I started to get a great foundation and idea that was executed well. Therefore, I decided to approach my project this term in the same manner, the only difference being that I was focusing on Leicester rather than Cornwall.
Due to teaching being online, I had no access to my studio which made scale a difficulty and so I stuck to a small size of A4 in general, the biggest pieces being A3. Although I would have worked bigger if I had the chance, I still feel that I managed to capture Leicester well at the size I was working with.
As I live in Leicester I was able to go out and draw from life, which I didn’t get the chance to do with my Cornwall project in term one and so I worked from photos a lot then. I captured a lot of primary evidence in forms of quick drawings and detailed drawings to give myself a large range of imagery to develop throughout this project.
When it came to colour, I started off quite simple with mundane colours and built up to more experimental uses of colour as my ideas developed and I progressed in the project. A lot of my uses of colour and colour palettes came from my artist research. I decided to do this so that the colours I was using were informed and not purely random as I feel it is always appropriate to identify why you make certain decisions in your work. As all of the artists I researched approach their colour uses in different ways, I had a lot of ways to approach the use of colour in my own work.
I began doing paintings by working over sketches in my sketchbook to get some ideas and more solid foundations to develop later on. I even started exploring uses of bold colours in my sketchbook to see how compositions would be affected.
The crit helped me to identify areas to improve as well as areas to develop further as they were working well. A key area I was told to change was to start breaking out of my sketchbook and use my initial drawings/paintings/studies to combine in different ways or use as foundations to explore colour palettes. One of the ideas I explored was to combine different streets together to create ‘hybrid’ buildings which I felt worked really well with block colours and small details.
I worked onto paper and cardboard with my favourite being high quality fabriano paper as it holds paint well and doesn’t warp easily. With the covid situation, this was also the best idea as I didn’t have the facilities or equipment to make canvases and I didn’t want to waste money on buying bad quality canvases. Overall, I feel the materials used worked out really well as acrylic paints apply quite nicely to fabriano paper. In addition to this, I used paint pens and ink pens to add small details by layering which is something I have always enjoyed as you can so easily change the outcome of a flat painting by adding lines or sketchy details over the top.