OUAN404 - Environmental Storytelling - Home

The familiar place I chose to draw for the brief was my home. As the brief was set over the christmas period, I took the opportunity to use various locations around my house to draw and paint from. I thought it would be a good contrast to the forest to paint somewhere inside and try to incorporate the use of unnatural lighting such as lamps, and fairy lights as oppose to the natural lighting that was present in Chevin forest. The idea of using locations both inside and outside meant that I could get an idea for how to portray completely different environments visually.

When it came to finding certain aspects around my house, I almost tried paintings things as if it were a still life in the sense that I would arrange certain household objects in a particular way or approach it from a certain angle to make sure the composition I chose to draw from was interesting. Similarly as to when I went to Chevin forest to draw, I tried to use a mixture of different medias to find out which worked best. When it came to painting a place inside, I felt that there were quite a few suitable types of media, I did however enjoy using pencil to sketch out certain areas and because of the definition of the household objects in the areas that I was drawing, it meant that I could incorporate a lot of detail into a line drawing alone. I also tried to portray lighting as accurately as I could in parts using watercolour to blend the light more seamlessly in with the objects and try to incorporate it as accurately as I could based on what I saw. When it comes to painting and drawing, I feel like perspective is one of my strengths, whereas portraying light through paint is something that I really have to look at more closely and study in order to improve, because at the moment it's something that I find quite difficult to represent. The work I produced for the brief in my house took different amounts of time based on the size, media and what the subject was. For example, the canvas paintings took a lot longer than the pencil sketches, but this is also due to the fact that I'm much more comfortable working with pencil despite the enjoyment I get from painting. One of the reasons I enjoy this brief and the visual language module as a whole as it does give me the opportunity to experiment with media and produce finished illustrations or images to an extent, which is something I enjoy.