Magic Ladies

During the easter holidays I said I'd take part in an exhibition thats being held by someone I met on foundation, there was no brief for it I just had to submit or make one or a series of pieces to exhibit in any frame I wanted at a pub in Leeds. I said yes because partly because I wanted a little distraction from COP but also because when I saw her asking for submissions for pieces to exhibit I felt like I was ready for the first time to actually put my work in the public. This is definitely not something I've felt before and I think its down to this first year of the course and the last few briefs giving me a little bit more confidence in my own brain and my own practise (YAY)

The exhibition is to raise funds for Womens Aid which made me even happier to be submitting some work because a lot of the profits of anything thats sold goes to a really great charity (not that I'm actually thinking that anyone will buy my work, baby steps...). Because of the cause of the event I wanted to make some kind of pieces to do with empowering and inspiring women, and I'd been messing around with this witchy lady character that I've become really attached to. I started planning little sketches in my sketchbook at home as I already had an idea in my mind of what I wanted the final things to look like and the kind of feeling I wanted them to have, but I found that the combination of working from home and not having any real brief for once meant that I was really unmotivated and had to do so many pages of trials before I started making anything.

Look how many pages of roughs:

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

final page

What I found out from this:

• My brain can handle a task like this so much better if I give it a title and a rough idea of a brief on my own, even if it hasn't been specifically been given one by the person I'm doing it for it just helps my brain to organise it a little bit better and get to work on it quicker
• I'm really obsessed with drawing hands, legs, arms and female bodies in general at the moment, I had so much fun drawing the nude lady on the rock 
• Roughing really, really helps. It was really hard to start because I had no direction but once I started roughing, new visual ideas kept coming to me and I had almost too many elements that I wanted to add to the picture
• Simpler is better. When I started drawing this lady I drew her in copic markers with a black, fineliner outline like this:

I've realised now from some of the things we've learnt this year that things look better simplified and if you take a few of the lines out of a drawing people are still going to understand it. 

• Ladies are magic

The finished things:

I'm really happy with my time management skills because I made time to do this around finishing my COP which shows how much I actually wanted to make these things. I'm getting them printed at uni to pick up tomorrow before I give them in at the end of the month, the exhibitions on the 11th of May and even if no body buys the pictures I'm still really happy because I've entered an exhibition that wasn't mandatory, like this is the first piece of proper illustration I've just done because I wanted to and wanted people to see it. (although fingers crossed someone actually does buy them because I am v poor, hurry up student loan.)