This exercise asks to create a subjective drawing, and I chose the term “Umbrella” to create exactly that. Why umbrella? Basically it has been raining a lot over the last few days – it’s proper autumn weather now – and I just felt in the mood for a umbrella piece.
In contrast to the previous exercise that asked to look at an object objectively, this time I’m to compile my associations, emotions and thoughts first, create a moodboard and start collecting a range of intput first, and then based on these results create an illustration with my own ideas and impressions I have.
I started with a small sketch from my memory of what I think an umbrella would look like, and a spider diagram of thoughts I associate with umbrellas. At first I didn’t think I would find that many related topics – other than rain and bad weather that is, but it turns out that I did find some interesting things, that did take a bit of time to find. For instance, I did put down things like “rain, rainy weather, autumn, usueful, etc”, but I also relate situations e.g. sharing umbrellas with best friends, or couples cuddling while going for a walk in the rain. I also discovered that I associate quite a few pop culture things with umbrellas: Mary Poppins and her flying umbrella as well as the yellow umbrella that frequently pops up in How I met you mother sprang to my mind. I also came up with quite a few songs that feature umbrellas, most famously Rihanna’s interpretation.
I then went on to do a few study and composition sketches, to look at an umbrella from different angles. For the composition I tried to look at the whole thing, as well as tried several versions with cutting the frame, so I would only show a part of the umbrella because I found it to be more interesting.
The left page shows an umbrella made from Washi tape; it’s delicate and an interesting material to use. The background is done with pencil. The view is very plain, and I don’t particularly like it because I found it too boring and to flat.
The right hand side is colourpencils and aquarells, and I wanted to try out a similar composition that I tried with pencils earlier to see how it is in colour. I prefer the colour version, but I found it too uninspiring in a way, so I went on to work on a new view.
Another quick compositional study is done with self-adhesive paper on pencil to see how the contrast works. I like the contrast of the grey and the bright red, and I will probably continue using it for my final illustration.