For the second part of exercise 3.2 I decided to take a walk down to the beach and the surrounding parks in my area (basically anywhere near my flat where a lot of people go). I decided on the beach as I thought people walk along the beach all year round and it’s the main attraction in Eastbourne. I sat on benches and drew from them discreetly as I know most people would be suspicious if you kept glancing at them, I will make many small sketches and perhaps do some continuous line drawing like I did in part 1 when I drew my Mum as I did them really fast and I will have to work at speed when drawing people as they will most likely be walking.

Planning where I will be drawing:

In the top left-hand corner (near Tesco Express) is my flat. Everywhere else that I have marked with red circles are the places (with benches) I will be drawing in.

Drawings:

I decided to try and use a different medium for these pieces as I thought it would be too similar to my single figure drawings of my mum that I did in the previous exercise.

I chose watercolour paints as I had that in my ‘toolkit’ that I put together for this part of the unit.

I firstly drew two sketches using just a pencil but then decided to incorporate the watercolour, I did this by drawing a rough line of the person and then using watercolour to fill in the detail.

Annoyingly (after the first pencil drawings I did) I decided to focus on this old lady who was sitting on a bench with her walking stick as I thought she wouldn’t move anytime soon… I was proved wrong, she got up whilst I was half-way through painting her details, so I decided to leave her upper body blank.

One thing I did realise soon enough about the location I chose is that because it was the seafront everyone was on the move… walking … so I had to be very quick when illustrating them. So as I had chosen to use watercolour as my medium I thought it would be smart to target the people who were sitting down as I had a longer amount of time to draw them.

It was interesting to use a different medium, I see it as a sort of experimentation as I wasn’t ever much of a fan of watercolour so I’m glad they ended up quite good but for me the line drawings using just the pencil are still my favourite, maybe that’s because I use pencils more than watercolour in general so I am more confident when drawing with them?