Bobby Britnell

I spent a couple of days at Littleheath Barn doing a workshop 'Imaginative Design using tone & colour' with Bobby Britnell. This post is particularly photo heavy - I should, perhaps, have written two posts!

Day 1
For the first activity we covered the paper with charcoal and then drew into it with pointed scissors, charcoal and an eraser.

The second activity was a group activity where 4 of us on this table drew lines on the paper, moving anti-clockwise around the table.  There was another table with 6 people doing the same activity.

Then we each chose a pastel and started to colour in some of the shapes.

Then Bobby separated out the sheets and we each took one of the 10 sheets.

I took photos at various stages of the colouring in but I'm not going to show you every one.

Some of the lines were too harsh in this

 So I knocked some of it back.  We had to do more to it on day 2.

We went on to do line drawing where you don't take the pen off the paper.  We had to draw the person opposite.  I won't tell you who it is!  Anyway, we had to try 1. not looking at the paper and only at the person, 2. drawing with our non dominant hand, 3. drawing being able to look at the paper and 4. giving the face an expression.   Bearing in mind I was drawing a woman, I have here John Major puppet from Spitting Image,  almost Hermann Munster, Bruce Forsyth and who knows!

These drawings were of me

Then we moved on to some colouring exercises: Complementary, analagous, primaries (only I did secondaries with it) and black and one colour where I got carried away with the black!

Here's how it should have looked!

Lastly on day 1 we drew with a wax candle and then with wax crayons, followed by an ink wash.  I like the technique but didn't particularly like what I did.

 On to Day 2

We continued with the pastel drawing.  I had completed colouring all the spaces but went back to it to add more layers and to knock back some of the sharp edges.  I tried putting frames on various parts of the paper to isolate sections.

Sorry I didn't photograph this quite straight!

I took one last photo of the paper before Bobby gave me the next thing to do.

In preparation for the workshop, Bobby had drawn lines on the back of the paper, which none of us had noticed.   She had drawn 3 strips for us to cut off.

This one in particular looked like it could be made into a landscape hanging.

 Having cut off the strips I was left with a large square.

 I took various photos of small sections of the large square.  And tried the strips on top of the square.

 
The strips had lines drawn on the back for squares and rectangles.  I cut up two of the strips.  This was the best small rectangle.

We started a new exercise which I cannot explain.  I struggled to understand what we were doing.  It started with drawing squares with charcoal.

Adding some circles.

And then I added colour.  This isn't how it was supposed to look but it's my version of what I understood to be the instructions.  

We also did some tonal exercises which I didn't photograph.  I had done a workshop with Bobby before and some of the exercises are described here.

Congratulations if you've made it to the end of this post.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice