Organising data and using shadows

In this weeks tutorial I realised that most of my drawings consist of various lines so I wanted to experiment with different styles of drawing. I tried to push myself by producing a loose watercolour painting of flowers rather than accurate ones, and produced the painting below.

Watercolour flower painting

As well as doing this I played around with the image by collaging it with a line drawing (below left). I also cut up a scan of the painting into shapes and tried to re-organise them based on their colour (linking to taxonomy, and data collection), and the way that the colour merged (below right). Although I wasn't that pleased with the results, I learnt that I like contrasting line and watercolour, as well as using the paper as a way of documenting data, even if its just sorting an image into colours.

Manipulating scans of my drawings and arranging into data 

I also wanted to try and do some looser drawings to add variety to my work so I drew from plant shadows, drawing quickly because the plants were moving in the wind which helped me to achieve a loose drawing. I felt that these drawings were slightly out of my control as I just drew as quickly as I could before the sun went in, rather than consciously choosing which bits of the plant to draw which I thought added a really nice quality to my drawings. I definitely intend to develop on the idea of working with shadows next week, possibly on a larger scale.

Quick shadow drawings of plants outdoors

I also went out to take photos of various natural environments that I liked the colour, texture or composition of. I then studied a few of my favourite photos closely and represented them as data. I started doing this using Pie charts, but also dividing up rectangles in a similar way. I think the rectangle experiment worked better because I don't feel that using traditional data representation such as pie charts will suit my context.

Representing my photos as data

I think this could give me some good ideas for composition and I think that taking more photos like these could help the rest of my work as well.