Sophia Xu

Talking Colour

In the first part, “Talking Colour,” I started by recording everyday details I discovered in London. These included plants, buildings, crafts, scenery, and animals. Many of the plants I drew were found during my visit to the Horniman Garden Museum. I used different materials to create my artwork, like oil pastels, watercolours, markers, and pastels. I also tried to added my own ideas of the colours to make the artworks more interesting . At Horniman Gardens, besides plants I had saw a fox. I tried to use watercolours to show its details and colours. My favourite piece is the first drawing for this part in the blog of the duck. I saw it by a river an afternoon while walking to the station. I thought the water ripples around it were very interesting. I wanted to use different colours to show the texture of the water. So I chose red and orange oil pastels. This makes the duck stand out and gives the ripples a bold, fiery feeling around it and I think this was a good try . With the work below the duck‘s drawing, I drew the stage set from “Les Misérables” that I watched at the Queen’s Theatre，and I had using the same idea from the stage set while i observing it to design and complete the whole drawing. The colours I used were inspired by the screen on stage before the show started，so I used gradients of brownish-yellow and blue . Overall for the “Talking Colour” section, I experimentally used several different art materials. But I think I could have been bolder with colours. I noticed my comfort zone is mainly with less bright colours, and better at using watercolours. Maybe next time I can try more bold colour combinations later to make my work more interesting.

Talking Pattern

In the “Talking Pattern” section, my view point of drawing things had changed compared to Part 1 “Talking Colour”. In Part 1, I drew all the objects I saw in a direct and detailed way. But in this section, I tried to drew the things, plants, or food I saw in a bigger way, or only drew parts of them. In the second picture, I actually drew the texture of fried chicken. Thinking that I needed large areas of color, I chose ink as a base material. I used a big brush to put down the shape, then layered the colors to blend them. After that I used a white marker to add the highlights. I found this way of painting very experimental and fun for me. Besides a few pictures at the end where I used oil pastels, markers, and watercolors to draw plants, I also tried using stencils for creation in this section. I used two sets of stencils. For the first picture, I cut a diamond-shaped stencil which had shapes of flowers and leaves inside. I had arranged them in a row, used blue ink on the cut-out parts, and then simply drew the flower centers with black watercolor. This was a very interesting try compared to my other purely hand-drawn works. For pictures three to five, I made a stencil based on a beautiful structure on a house roof I saw at the Horniman Garden. I traced my source material onto transparent paper and carved it out. Then I tried different things with it: I tried watercolor, filled the empty spaces with a white marker, made some spontaneous extended designs, and created works by photographing its shadow. This was a wonderful experience and gave me a lot of inspiration, as I did different tries with one stencil and saw many possibilities. Overall for this section, I think besides adding more designs next time, it would also be useful to make some stencils that can be used multiple times to explore more arrangements and effects.