Incorporating Machowski into Blanketed Feeling's

These pages of my sketchbook are a few experiments that I have started with the intention of adding my new found drawing style with the expressive mark making and use of colour that my first artist Machowski uses, then as I develop these I will start to add texture to them and keep the refining process going till I am at point where I am happy that there is nothing more that can be done to them.

The first page of these experiements I am very happy with as I went for a simple colour scheme of blue and purple and I wanted to make these marks look really sketchy and expressive so I used acrylic paint and really heavily watered it down to make an almost watercolour thickness of paint. I wanted to make one mark and leave it at that so none of the marks have been gone over multiple times as I wanted to not overdo it and really have the colour as an accent to the drawing and for it to show off the shape of 'Blanketed Feelings'.

The second of these pages I am not as happy with due to the fact that the subtly that I achieved with the previous experiment isn't present in this piece as I upped the amount of colours I used and by doing this and going over the red bit twice it rather than elevates particular parts of the drawing of the page it seems to weight it down and it gets lost and it becomes all about the three colours and how heavy they are in comparison to the delicate biro marks that are present underneath and around the paint. To go back and refine this I think I am going to paint over this page and start from fresh as there is already too much on this page so trying to add more I think will only add to the problem so I will paint this page white and keep the numbers of colours I use down and how heavily I apply the watered down paint.

I learnt from my last piece by going back to what worked in the first experiment so I used similar colours but darker tones of them and with this experiment as the drawing was below 'Blanketed Feelings' I needed to make sure that the paint rather than overpowering the drawing, elevated it out of the page so that it feels like you are sitting under the blanket similar to how I was when drawing it. I feel that again with this piece the level of subtlety that was had in the first piece has been regained and that I know that when I do this due to the delicate lines a biro pen makes that I cannot be heavy handed with the paint as it outbalances the harmony between the paint and the pen and makes the actual subject of the blanket itself feel weighed down into the page when in actual fact the blanket is the opposite of that and that it is a material that is light and floaty and needs to have delicate mark making involved in the paint and the pen in order to get a feeling for the texture that the piece has.

In the fourth page of my experiments including Machowski into my drawings I used the drawing of 'Blanketed Feelings' from the top and this time I needed to make sure that the centre of the experiment, the middle spike in the blanket felt like it was at the forefront compared to the two spikes in the blanket either side of it which is why the two other spikes on either side of the centre spike are coloured in this dark blue colour compared to the much lighter toned green. By doing this I wanted the blue to feel like shading and that it is darker because it is further back in more in the shadow compared to the areas that have this lighter green colour placed over them, again by doing this I had to make sure that I wasn't heavy handed with the dark blue and overpowering the drawing and I believe I was successful in doing this and I think I achieved the look of the centre spike sticking further out than the other two either side of it.

This experiment is the first in this book as it has a drawing on top of a drawing and well as paint applied to it. This allowed me to do for the unusual effect of rather than using paint to elevate the drawing from the page, it allowed me to pick out lines and shapes I thought were interesting in both of the pieces combined so it meant rather than having to stay to the figurative lines of the blanket for either drawing I could mix and match and have not full but very expressive mark making and while doing this I made sure that when I added any extra colours that the subtlety was being maintained and that my colour complimented the drawing and helped convey the texture of the blanket rather than oppress it onto the page and feel very heavy.