For this exercise I decided to draw my mother as I live with her and see her the most. My mother has a similar daily routine to me. We both work full time so our days have a routine, I decided to lay out an average routine below and choose the right time to settle and draw:

• 7:15 – Wake up
• 8:15 – Leave home for work
• 8:30 – Start work
• 13:00 – Lunch hour
• 14:00 – Back to work
• 17:30 – Finish work
• 17:50 – Eat dinner
• 19:30 / 20:00 – Watch EastEnders
• 21:00 – Chill out time/ bath/ computer etc.
• 23:00 – Sleep

I decided to draw my mother when we had both finished work and had eaten dinner, so whilst she was watching TV (See above from 19:30 until 20:00 on the schedule). I experimented by changing my drawing style a few times to see how the outcomes would differ.

First I drew ‘sketchy’ sketches to warm up showing a lot of lines where I had tried to perfect the proportions: (Left: Mum watching TV with remote in hand / Right: Mum holding a cup of tea)

Next I decided to draw her profile. I used a similar technique as above but decided to rub the lines out as I wanted a clean illustration: (Mum’s profile)

Finally I thought back to when I was attending art college and remembered a technique that I really enjoyed using to create drawings of humans (as that’s not my strong point). I used continuous line drawing for the three final sketches: (Left: Mum applying hand cream / centre: Mum drinking tea / Right: Mum scrolling on laptop).

Out of these sketches I like the three continuous line drawings the most as I like the creative freedom it gives me, my pen just seems to glide to where I need it to go when I use this technique. I also like the fact I could develop these line drawings more as they have so much potential if I were to add colour or texture etc. My mum rarely stops and gets up a lot so I had to do as many drawings as I could in this time! (which was an interesting challenge in itself! I think it even pushed me to create the last three drawings which are my favourite! 🙂