Ella week 2 results

Hello! It's Ella here with my week two results! I am a bit of a luddite on Blogger, and can't figure out how to edit the post Tor has scheduled with her results, so I am doing a separate post with my results!

Q. What did you think when you thought up the week's task?

A. I thought it would be fun to do an expressive art exercise!

Q. Talk us through your image...

A. Well, in this case, it’s many images. I felt a bit silly doing the exercises, but whenI got to the last part where we were supposed to draw-not-draw something by describing it’s movement, and describe what was happening, again, I think I was fairly skeptical, but I really feel it helped unlock some of the imagination I feel has been dormant in me for a while. I decided to have in mind a duck on the water, and I was describing, outloud that it was floating smoothly, the sunshine was glimmering, the water had rays of that sunshine glinting off it. The feel of the ducks feathers etc. That it has a sweet fluffy tail. I really felt it helped me imagine what I was doing, which I always feel is a struggle. I will come back to this!

Q. How do you feel about your results?
A. Not much to look at, I am sure! But I kind of like the looseness of it all!

Q. What do you think was the least successful part of your piece?

A. That there’s no real “finished” piece to show here, which I feel is letting the blog down a bit...

Q. And the most successful?

A. I found the last task really unlocked something, so I am excited to try that again, and this time try and do something figurative. Maybe I will post some more on the blog at some point!

Q. Did you learn anything?

A. Yes, see answers above!

Q. Any final thoughts?

A. I wish I had left more time for this. It’s been a busy week, and I left it until the last minute to do!

and just for fun, here is a video I made of myself doing the exercise (sped up for fun and boredom levels of viewer!)

Challenge #2

Hello! This is Ella here with challenge number 2!

I picked up this book from my mum's bookshelf when I stayed over the other day. I started to read it that night, and completely loved it! It's full of really helpful advice and has some great creative exercises too. It's aimed at "the young artist", but has some sophisticated advice in there, and was just what I needed to read in the first module of my MA. I was also very pleased to see the bookplate inside. My mum would have been 15 when she was awarded this book, and she grew up to be a sculptor, so maybe all the advice worked!

 

 So, onto challenge number 2! It is from a chapter in this book, called: "Exercises in acting-out art". I was attracted to it when I first read the book, and have been meaning to do it since I read it. I think I can best describe it as an active, almost meditative creative doodle exercise. We get to move as we draw, and even talk aloud as we work. I am hoping it might unlock my imagination, which I think has been buried inside me after years of "adulting"! As it says at the beginning: "be prepared for unbelievably effective and lasting results!". Here's hoping!

Results - week 1

Hello! This is Ella here, posting my week 1 results.

So this is my result:

We thought it might be a good format to each answer the same set of questions each week. So here are my answers:

Q. What did you think when you saw the week's task?
A. I felt that Tor had thrown me in at the deep end - "damn you Tor!" Is what I thought! No such thing as easing us in. For context, I am used to drawing from observation, and am not confident at all drawing from my imagination. I was hoping we might be recreating a photo in our own style, so I was a bit scared by the prospect of doing a three panel comic.

Q. Talk us through your image...
A. I felt quite stuck at first, but there was a point in my pondering of the image that I felt that the women looked quite like octopuses or squids, and the rest kind of went from there.

Q. How do you feel about your results?
A. Weeell.... I feel that I have made a three panel comic which doesn't make any sense, and is pretty conventional. I made the image in ProCreate, which is an app on the iPad, which I am also learning, so it was a learning curve in more than one way. However, I am quite pleased that I have managed to create something. I hope in time I will be able to actually put some personality in my imaginative work, and also that my rendering technique, whatever that may be (proCreate etc) will improve too!

Q. What do you think was the least successful part of your piece?
A. I wish I had thought of a more original or snappy story. I am expecting good things from Tor! I'm also not sure I have got the reading order of the speech bubbles right.

Q. And the most successful?
A. That I actually completed the task. More than I might have hoped for.

Q. Did you learn anything?
A. Yes, it has got me thinking about sequence and reading order, which is a really great thing for me to be thinking about, as my next module on the MA I am studying is "sequential image".

Q. Any final thoughts?
A. Thanks Tor for pushing me! I am glad you set this task, despite my reservations!

And this is Tor, with my comic:

Q. What did you think when you thought up the week's task:
A. I'd been reading Tom's book as I mentioned, and fancied doing something comics-related from that. I knew Ella would get a bit of a fright, but hoped it would be fun!!

Q. Talk us through your image...
A. I realised quite early that I wasn't going to make a coherent story, so I've cheated and gone for literal gobbledygook.

Q. How do you feel about your results?
A. I like the cat and the mummy, which are new characters for me to use somewhere else! And I always enjoy drawing a brain in a jar.

Q. What do you think was the least successful part of your piece?
A. It's nonsense - that's kind of a shame!

Q. And the most successful?
A. I like the colours! I was looking at the Ahlbergs' Funnybones again recently, and remembering what beautiful books they are.

Q. Did you learn anything?
A. I'm not sure that I did - and I think I should have gone for something simpler for our first challenge!

Q. Any final thoughts?
A. I love yours Ella, and I'm really happy to read that you got something out of it!! Swapping what we're learning seems like a great result from Next We Draw!

Challenge #1!

Hello again! It's the first Thursday of the year, and of our challenge! It's Tor here, taking the first turn. My challenge for us both comes from my teacher and founder of SAW, the cartoonist Tom Hart. I've spent time this holiday reading his fantastic and helpful book How to Say Everything.

As above, I challenge us to use the compositions and shapes of a comic to make our own short strips. I don't think we should worry too much about making a story, just staying within these compositional constraints to see what we come up with.

The strip we will use is a section from Richard Outcault's Buster Brown and his dog Tige:

See you next Thursday!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to our new drawing project! 

We are Ella and Tor, friends from the time when we were born in Roehampton Hospital in London two days apart. We have always drawn, both together and apart - and began our careers doing our Art Foundation Course together at Wimbledon School of Art in 1996.

After Wimbledon, Ella went to Winchester School of Art to take a Fine Art, Painting BA. Since then she has had a successful career in book design, and until recently was Head of Campbell Books having worked at Pan Macmillan for 15 years. She is now a freelance illustrator, designer and student on the Cambridge MA in Children’s Book Illustration at Anglia Ruskin University.

Tor has an Illustration BA from Kingston University. She has been working as an artist and author since then, and has published over thirty children's books with publishers including Macmillan, Walker Books, Templar, Andersen and Quarto. She is also a contributor to The Phoenix weekly story comic for children, Bayard magazines in France and is currently a student on the Comics Intensive at the Sequential Artists' Workshop in Gainesville, Florida.

From a young age, Tor drew from her imagination, making up characters and comic scenes. Ella always drew from observation, taking the real world as her inspiration. We hope that coming from these different perspectives, there will be a lot we can learn from each other - whilst having fun too.

Each week on Thursday we will take turns setting each other drawing challenges. 

And once we're up and running we'd love it if people joined in!