Drawing has been a key element of art throughout history and in the contemporary world and is an incredibly important tool for creative exploration. It enables the visualisation and development of perceptions and ideas and allows the artist to get these concepts down quickly and easily. There are some artists out there that don't learn to draw before they go on to paint and that's ok if that's what they choose to do but on the whole most painters do learn to draw as it's a fundamental key to achieving accuracy in both proportion and structural line.

I've been drawing since I was a child and It's been a tool for my own exploration and thought which has supported and enhanced my work over the years. Drawing allows you to spend a lot of time observing and recording your observations, practising hand-eye co-ordination, thinking about the structure, form and surface of the subject and recording light and shadow. It's an excellent basis to have before you start to learn to paint and less expensive too! 

Drawing and painting are unique art forms in their own right and I adore both which is why I often combine the two in my work. Using mixed media gives me the best of both worlds and at the same time allows me to experiment with a variety of materials and techniques.

Behind the scenes in my studio, when I'm not working on the 100 day project, I'm exploring my love of both the figurative and the abstract by merging the two together. I enjoy the process of depicting a subject realistically but for me that's not quite enough. Abstract art doesn't attempt to represent an accurate depiction of the subject but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect. I'm extremely interested in investigating how both the figurative and abstract can work in harmony together to create my own unique visual language. 

At the start of today's drawing it was created with intention by drawing out the horse as I continued to look at the anatomy of the head but then it began to take on a life of its own, so I went with it. I love the way that abstract art enables you to do this. By simply letting yourself go, throwing out all the rules, doing what feels good and allowing intuition to take over, but then pulling back and honing in on certain areas using intention, I find, is a much more interesting and exciting way of creating a piece of art.

This piece is drawn onto brown Kraft paper using an 8B graphite stick, Onyx pencil, Mars Lumograph Black pencil, White pastel, Chinese white pencil and an eraser. On reflection I could maybe have worked a little more into the horse's neck on the right just to give a hint of definition. I also feel it could possibly do with a layer of something else, perhaps a different type of mark or another kind of media, to add more contrast to the drawing 🤔