For my subjective drawing I decided to draw a pair of glasses. Luckily I have a few pairs myself, so I went with this half-rim pair.
I chose these because there’s a number of different materials involved, so it opens things up a bit when it comes to the collage elements later.
I wrote down a whole ream of words trying to find the right one to move forward with. Funnily enough, this was probably the hardest part of the exercise. Without much to go on, I went with “cool”, figuring that it evoked something that was kind of sleek, tempered, understated.
Being a kind of practical object, I wanted to use kind of practical materials. I went into the kitchen and thought that cling film and tin foil both evoked something mechanical and modern that provides utility, perfect for my glasses. I went with packing paper for the brown parts, having a nice ridged texture that makes me think of wood grain. For the black, I remembered that in the garden there’s an old shelf unit that’s waiting to be thrown away, and it has a peeling layer of faux wood panelling, which is kind of gross, but works for this purpose!
I looked again at the pinterest board I made for moodboards in the previous exercise.
There’s lots of cool geometric arrangements there, so I wanted to make something kind of modern-art-ish to reflect my glasses being a kind of modern-ish thing.
I put my bits of materials together, and am pretty pleased with the result.
Next I did my line drawing. I chose bristol board as my surface, feeling that it being a smooth, modern feeling paper material was perfect for this project.
Finally I started filling in my drawing with the materials. This turned out to be a nightmare. I hadn’t realised that I chose all the most awkward, finicky materials. I traced my image and used the tracing to cut out the materials to the right dimensions, which proved exceptionally difficult to do neatly (try cutting out a piece of cling film in a precise lens shape!) But I persevered and somehow managed to get it to look something like how I envisioned.
I used thumb tacks to tie down the cling film, and tried to place them tactically (heh, tacktically!) to make sense with the glasses. This exercise challenged me to do something I wouldn’t normally do, and I really enjoyed thinking about how to approach it.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 