Drawing Day 2022

Drawing Day (May 16th every year) is a great time to celebrate and appreciate all artists, illustrators and designers. Although it's easy to take for granted, the work of drawing-based artists is all around you every time you buy a card, see a designed product, an illustrated book, fashion illustrations, advertising, and web design. It's about known, unknown, past, present and future artists in galleries, on social media, in the street e.g. murals and street art. 

Drawing is the basis of all art, rather like ballet is foundational to all other forms of dance. Both drawing and ballet provide techniques and approaches which underpin everything we do in art and dance. Nevertheless, there are of course some differences. For instance, I find that drawing is also a way of thinking and making artistic decisions. Drawing can form part of the final artwork even if it's in a different medium, either by combining it with other materials or by using it as a base sketch before overlaying it with another (e.g. by painting over it). Drawing is vital to keeping sketchbooks so it is an essential part of the daily artistic process. Sketching can also be done as an exercise to develop your visual and hand skills, such as completing one-minute sketches. 

Most artwork I undertake starts with an idea (especially if it's a conceptual artwork) followed by sketching where, on the sketchbook page, I'll roughly draw the composition, objects and what I'm trying to convey. Then I sketch it more fully in pencil. I may do several versions or simply develop the one main sketch. I'll assess from the fuller sketchbook drawing what materials (e.g. oil paints, acrylic paints, watercolours, pastels, street art pens, gel pens, coloured pencils etc) I want or will work best for my final piece. I decide on this together with selecting what I'm going to do the artwork on, e.g. canvas, sketching paper, cartridge paper, oil pastel paper, canvas paper, watercolour paper, and so on. If it is not a conceptual artwork, then I'll still think through the shapes, spaces, composition, angles, and so on through sketching it out with a soft pencil. This will either develop into a loose-style sketch, or a detailed drawing, or the basis for an artwork in a different medium e.g. pastels, paints. Sometimes I'll do various drawings on large, self-standing sheets of cartridge paper after my sketchbook work but before the final piece, as a way of developing my project and it's themes, as well as experimenting with different materials, formats and dimensions/sizes. 

Another way I sometimes work is to sketch my ideas, objects and composition straight onto the surface I'm using for the final piece. For instance, for my Silencing series, I do rough sketches straight onto the canvas, adjusting this until I settle on a final composition that expresses and symbolises my conceptual artwork before applying acrylic paint over my pencil drawing. 

As part of celebrating Drawing Day today, I've dropped another artwork in my Face2Face (non-binary genderfluid) Lesbians Series on Drawing Day (16th May). The subtitle for this one is: 'IDAHOBIT:  Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Rights':

Tomorrow (17th) is International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, Transphobia (and any other phobia against anyone in the LGBTQIAPD2S+ community) 🌈. So I've combined these two days in this drawing. Here they are talking to each other and comforting each other about their experience of lesbophobia and genderphobia. Their shawls are in grey for genderflux, the tassels of which are in the inclusive lesbian flag colours. This is reflected in the lesbian flag picture on their calendar, on which they have marked out IDAHOBIT on May 17th. On their shawls they also have the non-binary flag (higher up), and the genderfluid flag (lower down).

I've left it in my sketchbook to emphasise the role of drawing on Drawing Day. I've emphasised the drawing by keeping the shawl in pencil which draws the eye to the middle of the composition ie their bodies, which links with the IDAHOBIT theme for this year: 'Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Rights'.