Cardbaord City, Week Four

This week, Elizabeth and I carried on with the previous lessons work; the landscape of Barnsley onto cardboard. Using pastel, I carried on with Elizabeth's previous sketch and coloured in the door she'd drawn. Using pastel on cardboard was quite difficult - because of all the creases on the surface, the powder on the pastel sometimes collected up and it was hard to smudge it out and it was also hard to get details in. If I did this piece again, I'd probabaly use a different media. However, I believe the door turned out okay, it was light and smudgy which is what I was aiming for.

To make the door look more interesting, we decided to take the pillars from the reference photo and make it appear as if ivy was wrapped around them, to try and portray and represent how old the door looked in the photo.We were originally going to draw the ivy straight onto the cardboard, but then it was suggested to use card and make the pillars 3D, which we went along with; after measuring out the correct size of card, Elizabeth painted ivy onto one pillar, and used a mixture of coloured pencil and pastel on the other one. Once we were happy with them, we folded them around and stuck them onto the cardboard - I believe it looks very effective.

After the door, we looked at the photos once again and decided to add a window from the town hall and place it in the space next to the door. This was painted in watercolour, and compared to the green of the ivy ended up looking quite dark, but I believe this looks quite effective contrast wise and it also follows the reference picture which is full of shadow. The space behind the window was painted with a mix of acrylic paints to look like the colour of the Town Hall, and later on, bricks were also painted on. I believe the bricks could have looked better with a highlight and a wider range of tones, but they still look okay.

To mix up our range of mediums, we decided to do a mono print of one of our photographs. I used yellow printing ink for this, because it constrasts well with the brown parcel paper I used. I stuck a poly pocket down to the desk with tape - I had to make sure it was stuck tight - then used a roller to evenly spread the ink out on the poly pocket. If the ink is patchy, the mono print will have blotches on it. Once the mono print was dry, I added purple coloured pencil so that it wuld contrast with the yellow and to give the ink more detail.

We both knew that the mono print obviously needed a background, so I looked at the remaining photographs and cut out big patches of blue, whether it was the sky or buidings; I then ripped these patches up and stuck them down around the mono print.