my week at central saint martins
I recently took a short course at Central Saint Martins in "Experimental Fashion Drawing”. With Mr Grant off work for the week it was an incredible opportunity for me to go and spend a week doing my thang! I love to draw and illustrate bits for work but these drawings usually serve to demonstrate the look of an outfit. They need to be clear, fairly accurate and always with a tight time constraint. This week was about setting loose and seeing where it took me. Hopefully finding out my personal style and a new confidence to my illustration.
I imagined myself instagramming daily updates of beautifully rendered doodles Unfortunately this was not the case. I was learning from scratch again. It was HARD and I didn't like a single thing until the Thursday. As our tutor Alexis said, drawing ability is something you can learn, it takes practice and it IS hard. I kept pondering what was so difficult about it... it's only drawing after all. I think its the frustration of not seeing the results that you want to. The pencil and brush not making the precise marks I longed for. And also the FEAR of making mistakes. I think that it took 3 days to relax and allow the mistakes in. It was then that I really began to enjoy it and found confidence in my illustration.
The course was structured by daily themes and tasks that would improve our drawing skills, force us into new ways of seeing and try new techniques. Day 1 was all about quality of line with lots of continuous line exercises and blind drawings. Day 2 we tackled negative space and proportion. Day 3 was all about the face! Something that most artists still battle (and myself particularly struggle) with!! Days 4 and 5 we played with collage and the results were fantastic... I should also add there was homework most nights, eek! Not prepared for that and also tough after twins bedtime.
There was a great model to draw from every day. Alexis provided lots of props and outfits. Plenty of materials to explore and a sketchbook was provided. I thoroughly enjoyed my week as a student again and can highly recommend the course if you get the opportunity. They have a variety of illustration courses and this is the one that I attended Experimental Fashion Drawing. If you click the link, you will see a picture of me on the right!!