Head off into the city

 These are a selection of photographs I took whilst I was in Manchester City Centre. After being given the 'Origins' brief I decided I wanted to focus on textures of various surfaces; whether they'd been produced through weathering/erosion, plant growth or man-made. I was particularly drawn to the layers that were created and the variation of colours and shapes, depending on what the subject was.

I then began to respond to both my photographs and the 'chance cards' by deconstructing the objects as a whole and studying the shapes. By using a variety of different pencils, graphite and charcoal I was able to simplify the patterns and concentrate on individual parts of the subject. This is only a section of the full piece, which is responding to the 'make a drawing every 5 minutes for 60 minutes' chance card.  I chose to keep my background as plain as possible and vary between hard and soft pencils, to give the drawing some depth. 

I also wanted to recreate the textures that I had discovered. I incorporated an old piece of newspaper which I had found as I felt it allowed me to create a more interesting surface to work on, before also applying graphite, ink and white charcoal on top. This time I was allowing the surface of my drawing to be the focus, rather than the drawing itself, so I chose to create a simple continuous line drawing using biro. Although I like the simplicity of my previous drawing, I much prefer this piece as I believe that sometimes it is important to be able to touch the art, as well as look at it. 

This drawing was my response to the chance card which asked me to create a drawing using 5 different pencils. Although it isn't following my ideas of focusing on the textures, I really like the strong shapes that have been created and the abstract aspect of the image.