colour block.

For this weeks fashion drawing assignment our focus was on drawing a fashion figure through the use of colour blocking. There are different ways of approaching this method, but there was one that I found worked best for me. One way is an observational approach, the blocks of colour are laid on the page influenced by the observation of the figure. Another approach, and one I gravitated towards, is to lay blocks of colour down on the page and then using those organic and flawed blocks of colour as a influence to pull out a figure.

Since I'm still trying to edit and loosen up my renderings, and push drawing from imagination, the approach of unconsciously laying down shapes of colour encouraged a more loose way of drawing and beneficial. I found it a lot easier to to develop and emerge a figure through the loose blocks of colour, rather than trying to render a figure from a stark white sheet of paper.

The objective of the assignment was to create a composition of four to five fashion figures using the method of colour blocking. Before creating the final composition, I did many 'warm-ups' in my sketch book to loosen me up and become familiar with the technique of colour blocking.

After doing many trials before-hand, I felt using one colour to develop my figures was the most successful and appropriate. Using only one colour encouraged me to really focus and spend time on the figure (something that I needed to work on). So for the final composition I worked with two colours of guasch paint, magenta and cyan. Although I didn't get the greatest feedback on the colour selection, I felt the colours had a nice contrast between each other and while being very saturated they still allowed the black rendering lines to come through. The guasch paint was a perfect medium for this excerise, it was easy to get a range of washes and dried quickly.

So far out of all our weekly assignments we have had to date, I felt the colour blocking has personally been the most beneficial. It was a lot easier and I felt more confident constructing these fashion characters when allowing the raw blocks of colour to guide and feed my imagination.