Projects → Drawing Year

Drawing Research and Development Year

2023 - 2024

To expand my research into drawing, I’m undertaking a year-long period of skills development. I attended the Royal Drawing School’s Online Drawing Development Year in 2023, accessing process-specific learning from skilled artists, whilst still being able to work in the Shetland landscape.

The aim of this time of intensive study and observation is to expand creative processes, leading to new ways of working with environment and drawing.

Spring Term

In spring term classes led to exploration of practical techniques and expanded media, through an exciting and broad range of creative approaches to drawing. Classes:

• Transforming Observation: Memory and Imagination

• Drawing the Figure

• Mapping: Drawing Internal Landscapes

• Global Museums of the Past and Future

• Drawing Space: Interior and Exterior

• Animals in Art

• Colour and Memory

Summer Term

Classes:

• Where Drawing Meets Words

• Abstraction Qualities in the Landscape, Gardens and Natural Forms

• Observation and Imagination

• Drawing Topographies: Internal and External

• Drawing Flux and Flow: Watercolour and Ink

• Contemporary Portrait

Summer’s classes explored further aspects of environment including topographies, viewpoint, chance and change. Aspects from the first term of imagination, memory, and developing visual vocabulary were built upon, enriched by new approaches like narrative. Further study of the figure continued to develop observational skills and technique.

Autumn Term

Classes:

• Drawing a Head

• Reimagining Ancient Myths, Lost and Future Worlds

• World Imagery: Drawing from Art, Drawing from Life

• Drawing Topographies: Internal and External

• Colour and Light: The Contemporary Portrait

• Sculpture and Form

The third and final term’s classes further honed observational skills with closer looking at the head, and colour and light, as well as imaginative techniques relating to environment and nature. The Topographies class was an extended 10 week course, leading to further exploration of dynamic pictorial space, narrative and place in drawing. The Sculpture class extended ideas of using drawing as a tool for composition in three-dimensions and close looking.

In-Person Days

In January 2024, the Online Drawing Development Year 2023 cohort were invited to two in-person drawing days at the Royal Drawing School.

It was a chance to finally meet up with everyone after our year of online classes, and to draw together at the school's beautiful Shoreditch studios.

We started the first day by wrapping up and heading out to Arnold Circus with concertina sketchbooks. The idea was to draw quite intuitively, using the format to play with space - looking up and down, near and far. So the drawing became not necessarily a depiction of the place, but more a series of moments stitched together. In the afternoon, we used our concertinas in collaborative drawings. It was lovely to respond to the marks of others, and especially as you really felt that you'd got to know each other's work so well through the course. On the second of our in-person days at RDS Shoreditch earlier this month, we explored portraits. The day started with some quick drawings of each other. We then spent the main part of the day working in pairs on collaborative double portraits, and it was really interesting to take it in turns to draw and to be drawn and learning from the other artist’s way of working.

Da Voar Draw Workshops

A series of ‘Da Voar Draw’ sessions during March and April 2024, each aiming to encourage participants to find focus through drawing, and immerse themselves in nature’s energy, rhythms and forms.

‘Voar’ - spring in Shetland dialect.

Da Voar Draw first run in 2021 as a series of daily activities on Instagram and Facebook. The project was part of Look Again Aberdeen’s ‘Create Networks’ Project, and aimed to connect creatives across the Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Orkney and Shetland area at a time when we were still living under Covid restrictions. This year, Da Voar Draw took a fresh look at the natural world through drawing - but this time in-person.

These workshops also brough together my year-long drawing research and development project, allowing me to share new creative processes and ways of working with environment and drawing.

For more information, visit journal posts.