This week in my Textiles lessons, we have been focusing on observational drawings. I have never really enjoyed observationals until now because, at A-Level, you are allowed to use certain techniques that suit your topic.  I am just going to talk you through a few of my favourites.

Black Pen and Water

This is my favourite technique at the moment. It is very simple, all you need is a black felt tip pen, water and a brush. Sometimes you will find that the ink is not completely black and once you add water to the pen, you can get some beautiful blue and purple tones as well. This is a good technique if you are trying to represent refractive qualities or if you are trying to achieve an inky design without the mess of an ink pot!

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Biro

With biro, you can achieve some lovely simple line drawings. It sounds boring, but I find with biro you always have to keep working on it as you can not rub out the lines. You can also get some texture within the drawings as you are constantly working on top of lines. You can translate this into Textiles with freehand embroidery, as this technique focuses on  line.

Oil Pastels

This is another technique which can illustrate texture.  You can fuse several colours together and layer as well while achieving a likeness to the object. It translates into Textiles as you can achieve appliqués based off your drawing. In this drawing below, I focus a lot on shading and I think it looks quite realistic.

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Continuous Line

Recently, I had a girl in my Year 10 class ripped out her continuous line drawing, but these drawings have a beautiful qualities. Again, you work on top of lines and you can see where you have made mistakes but can be translated into freehand embroidery as it was another continuous line technique. You can also layer drawings as seen below where I layer a chess piece on top of a rectangle.