The quality of the continuous line drawings I've been doing over the past few days reminded me very much of wire. It then reminded me of a drawing exercise which involves using wire to create the image with. I had never tried it until today 😱.

The idea with the wire drawing exercise is to explore lines and shapes that you create by bending the wire. It forces you to focus more on the line and less on the actual drawing. I think this is where I went wrong today. I fell back into the mindset that the 'drawing' of it had to be perfect. 

It may not look like much but this was so tricky to do. Firstly, I've never really used wire to draw with before so I had to give myself the time to get the feel for the material. The wire was 1mm, yet I still found it difficult to manipulate and for those sharp, tight corners I really had to try and bend it with a pair of pliers. This is what I found particularly frustrating.

As this was my first time, I decided to use one of my pencil drawings as a kind of template to model the wire against. I thought this would make it slightly easier. How wrong was I?! 🤯.

This process made me feel quite irritated and annoyed that I couldn't do it and I felt completely useless using the wire. I felt like I was a complete beginner, which I guess I was but the principles of 'line' remain the same. So, I've decided I'm going to give it another go. This time I'll get some finer modelling wire and see if it's easier to use.

One thing I did learn from this was that it certainly gets you concentrating on the contours and I found myself constantly asking myself questions about how I was going to control the one piece of wire in order to create certain curves, shapes and lines. I hope next time will be a little more enjoyable 🤞.