Knowledge & Understanding

1. Demonstrate a systematic and critical understanding of the breadth and depth of knowledge relating to contemporary drawing practice. 

While working professionally as an artist, you have to be aware of several issues that can affect the outcome of your work. The most well known one is plagiarism. As an artist you should avoid plagiarism as it can effect your reputation as an artist and is unfair to the artist whose work you plagiarised.

There are ways you can prevent your work from being plagiarised such as adding signatures to every piece of work you create and possibly adding watermarks. 

When creating a piece of artwork it is fine to use references, as long as the artists work you referenced is credited or mentioned somewhere and that you have their permission to use it. You should always make sure when referencing work as well not to simply copy a whole section of the work as this can be seen as plagiarism; but to use it to influence your own creativity. This way there is no way you can be accused of copying somebody else's artwork. 

Referencing artist work is a good way to improve your own artist skills and inspire you creatively. As long as it is done in the correct manner, it can help you develop your artistic skills and you can learn a lot from looking at other peoples work. You have to be aware of becoming too infatuated with someone's work as it can influence your work too much and end up looking like a copy of their style and can be seen as plagiarism.

While working as a professional artist, it is also important to try improve your drawing skills whenever you can. You should always be trying to better yourself and expand your knowledge and skills. This way you will be able to adapt to certain jobs that are available or with trends. It is important to practise all the time so that you can only get better and go through stages of artistic blocks and then struggle to get back into the swing of things. 

Last of all it is important to do what you are good at. Using references and looking at other artists work for inspiration is good, but that should not infuence you to draw like that artist. You should stay true to the style you are good at and work at making it stronger. Your drawings should always be unique and show who you are as an artist, not that you are good at copying another style of drawing. 

2. Demonstrate a comprehensive and critical understanding of techniques required for a range of drawing tasks. 

Demonstrated below are a variety of techniques used to create different drawing tasks:

Never letting my pen leave the page while constantly looking at the model.

Use of shading techniques to create shape and show light.

Use of various brush strokes, thin for outline and thicker for shading or texture.

Cognitive & Intellectual Skills

3. Critically analyse their own work and compare this to relevant research and current professional practice. 

Below are my development sheets for the brief "Imaginary Creature Design" created for this module.

Below is a piece created by Terryl Whitlatch, a freelance concept artist, of the anatomy of a bear from the skeleton, through to the muscles and then with the fur added. 

When comparing my own development sheets to this artwork done by Terryl Whitlatch, I noticed that although the final drawing that I did was a different way round to my earlier drawings, that they all were in the same pose like she did with her bear. I'm glad that I did that as it makes it easier to compare all three stages of skeleton, muscle and fur. I like how she outlined the skeleton drawing so that you can see how the structure of the body will look and work when it is completed. If I could go back and do it again, this is the change that I would make to my own drawing. 

Terryl Whitlatch's knowledge of animal anatomy is excellent which makes this and her other artwork or creatures so believable and life like. Especially the skeleton and muscle drawings, they look scientifically and anatomically correct. Whereas my own version look very amateur, so again if I got another chance to do this project, I would definitely spend a lot more time on the research and practice drawing skeletons to make my own drawings seem more realistic and easier to understand.

I feel overall I have done a good job, and by looking at someone else's work I can see where I have gone wrong but also what I have done similar which makes me feel confident about my work being successful and that I stuck to the brief.  

4. Synthesise observation, existing and acquired knowledge in the production of original imagery. 

For the "Imaginary Creature" brief I decided to create an animal that was about the size of a small/medium dog. I wanted it to be able to fit into a household setting and not be too large. However I didn't want it to look like it was an ordinary house pet.

For my references to create my creature, I looked at the images shown below. 

I looked at the bodies of cats, big and small. I looked at a lot of different animal skulls and decided to go a bit prehistoric and choose a skull that has big teeth like the sabre-toothed tiger. I liked the thought of my creature being made from two different animals, like they had been stuck together in the middle. I decided the main body of the creature would be built like a large cat, however the back (the legs) would be that of a bird. 

This is the finished result.

As you can see it has the prehistoric cat face and a cat like body with bird back legs. I decided that even the back legs would have fur, similar to like how baby penguins and other birds are covered in fur when they are very young. I thought that since this animal is small it could get away with that kind of look and feel to it. 

Practical & Professional Skills

5. Critically analyse and interpret visual situations in order to represent them effectively.

Below are a selection of life drawings that I completed over the duration of this module that I believe demonstrate this learning outcome. 

6. Act autonomously in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to achieve a professional result. 

The following images show a variety of techniques and tools that were used while creating them:

Paint, charcoal, chalk, graphite pencil and scratching into the grey board.

Coloured pencils on brown paper.

2B pencil on white paper

Handmade pen with Black ink mixed with water

Drawn out in Illustrator

Water colour pencils, marker pens and black fine liner on water colour paper

Maker pens and fine liner on white drawing paper

Water colour pencils with water added and a Biro pen on watercolour paper

A selection of water colour pencils with water added in a series of different variations on water colour paper, with added fine liner used on a few.

Drawn out and coloured in in Photoshop

Key Transferable Skills

7. Apply practice-based research to the development of original ideas. 

Shown below are some pieces of work from my "Imaginary Creature Design" brief. The brief stated that we had to create a creature that did not exist already. We could use parts of different animals to create our own imaginary creature.

We had to design our creature from scratch which meant starting at the skeleton. Then we had to add muscles and then fur or skin or scales etc. Throughout this stage we had to make sure everything would work correctly. So the muscles had to be able to work and had to fit correctly onto the skeleton. the skin also had to then fit correctly on top of the muscles and we had to consider any fat that would also plump up our creature. 

So shown below is the development of the creation of my Imaginary Creature from start to finish.