Knole Park

Yesterday was good, nice to know a bit more about the group. A lot of reading to do and I need to make sure I don't leave that until the evenings when I'm a bit tired and don't absorb the info!


My first trip to Knole Park and what a beautiful sunny day for it. The house was interesting, it's difficult to imagine exactly how it was living in the 16/1700's, no running water, no electricity, no proper sewer system, no cars. Time must have been filled very differently to now, a tapestry would have been a fairly major achievement I guess. 


I didn't get to go around the park so will go back to do that, did manage to photograph some deer on the way out. The road, the deer, the landscape did remind me of Richmond Park in south London. The garden was ok but for me nothing extraordinary

Beautiful knarled trunk

The pond was very peaceful, shame about the plastic football!

So lovely to see the deer so closely

.

First day in class...

A baptism of fire, straight into sketching, pinning up... I'm so glad, I was dreading the first pin-up because I know my sketching is on the high priority list of things to improve. I managed to forget some of the techniques I had learned over the summer; that each sketch should have fitted into a quarter of the sheet we were given; that time planning can help achieve the task, oh the list is endless. I was so nervous, the hour just disappeared. I'm sure the first one is always the worst!

Loads of positive pointers from Jamie, Julia and Paula, technique, process etc. I think this is going to be an amazing journey.

First sketch, this went below the first quarter of the page so the lower part of it is missing, no real problem as it didn't enhance the rest of the sketch in any way. It all needs simplifying and the annotation is not inspiring.

This sketch had to be squeezed under the top one as I had used too much paper, consequently the page ended up looking really busy. You can see that I spent too long on the first one as they become more minimal as time runs out!

It's getting worse, I was panicking at this point, desperate to get something down on the paper and therefore not thinking clearly.

With a few extra minutes I tried to give the trees some ground rather than have them floating in the air, I tried to give some perspective to the sketch but overall a pretty poor job.

Lessons learnt from this are:

• calm down and have a plan, I liked the idea of a rough sketch to show what was going onto the big sheet.
• the annotation could help the sketch in being more descriptive and adding a feel to the design rather than stating the ....... obvious. 
• try to draw at eye level to put the viewer into the space
• a person to be included to give a sense of scale

What a great first week...

I can't believe how quickly this first week has gone, Thursday was very informative but I ended up with IT overload, I'll revisit each area and become familiar with what's out there - so many resources at our disposal -  it's exciting.

I'm so glad I did the boat trip yesterday, the weather was bright and sunny and I've never viewed London from the Thames so a first experience, we went as far east as the Thames barrier and then west to the Tate Modern. I think the new building near London Bridge resembles an oversized Dalek, but all the new shapes and sizes give London a very interesting skyline which I really like.

Just set up my blog, tried to enter some detail but kept getting an error message, I'll try another time.
Really enjoyed meeting some of you guys at Induction yesterday and looking forward to getting to know everyone. If it's anything like the last 2 years this year will whizz by. Good luck to everyone, it sounds like it will be a great journey.