Exercise: A subjective drawing

For this exercise I had to take an object and write a down a series of words to describe it. These words would need to describe its particular qualities. The object I chose was a glass of gin and tonic with fruit in it. The words I chose to describe it are; refreshing, fruity, bubbly, cold, wet, delicious.

We were then asked to choose one word from our list as the basis of our idea and explore the idea visually by making a mood board. Due to the Covid 19 lockdown. I have limited materials with which to make a mood board. However, I do have some travel magazines and National Geographic magazines left over from my last mood board. Therefore from these and also from searching the Internet, I managed to find the images I wanted for my board.

The word I chose to use for my moodboard was ‘refreshing’. I looked through magazines to find images that represented this word. Once I had finished with the magazines, I did a web search to find other images that I wanted for my board, such as the cucumber and mint leaves.

Once I had finished my moodboard I started adding the colours, textures and materials identified during my exploration to my line drawing.

I used artists, masking fluid to keep the area where the bubbles were going to be clear and started to paint. I used Viviva Colorsheets to paint with as I love how vivid the watercolours are.

I am pleased with my final piece. There were many elements to this drawing that were new and experimental for me, such as drawing bubbles and painting in less realistic style’s. This was the also the first time I have used masking fluid. I liked the freedom that this exercise gave me to experiment, as the drawing was subjective rather than objective. Therefore, this was a fun exercise. The only thing I would have liked to incorporate which I did not, is to have the effect of condensation on the glass. I feel like this would have reinforced the idea of a cold, refreshing beverage. I think this would have been quite difficult to draw on a technical level, but is something that I would quite like to experiment with, to see if I can find a way of effectively communicating that.