Pushing my boundaries

After spending quite a time thinking about how to push my own boundaries in order to move away from the tight figure drawings, I decided to experiment with abstract marks with pastel. The first was on grey pastel paper and I used a selection of orange, purple, complimentary colours to see how they worked together with white linking and soften the colours.

I then tried a similar thing on pink pastel paper starting with blue, then adding greens and yellows, trying to get more movement into the piece.

 The next attempt was to use the drawing of Kate resting and try to simplify the drawing into a selection of shapes of colour and tone.
This is something I would like to take further and do far more abstract exercises. It seems a good way to experiment with composition and juggling line, tone, colour and marks.









Then I tried some pencil drawing into the abstract shapes to see how it would work.
I put more white on the knee and foot to try to bring it to the foreground.

The next attempt was to use a charcoal pencil to bring more definition to the form. Bottle and wine glass, hinted at, brings narrative into the picture. The dark tone brought across the background to simplify the shapes.
What I am finding now is that I am slowly getting away from the abstraction and getting too nitpicking with detail. Time to simplify again.


Too much drawing, too much white...

The drawing on the left is the latest attempt at simplifying. I feel I have got back to the original idea and pushed the drawing around with the pastels to prevent getting too preoccupied with detail.
Although the last two drawing look very similar, the difference in softening the white and adjusting the tones has made a big difference.
The next step is to try to get back to drawing the figure without losing the overall composition.