As a homework exercise for life drawing last year we were tasked with drawing a particular image in as many media and styles as we could (aiming for about 20 total). Here’s what I came up with…
Top left: Lead pencil.
Top Right: Felt-tip pen outlines.
Bottom Left: Brush pen.
Bottom Right: Highlighters.
Top left: Grey markers.
Top Right: Fine-liner pen, taking inspiration from Freud.
Bottom Left: Biro, trying to define the image using a continuous line across the contours of the face.
Bottom Right: An attempt to draw a net across the contours of the face.
Top left: Warm and cool planes of the face.
Top Right: Extended lines – every line enters and exits the image at the edges and the line width is modified where needed.
Bottom Left: Newspaper collage.
You can also see the grid I was using to reproduce the image in the blank bottom right area.
Left: Conté and charcoal.
Right: Pastel, using only horizontal strokes.
Top left: Watercolour.
Top Right: Charcoal and white gauche.
Bottom Left: Wet-in-wet ink.
Bottom Right: Charcoal – the entire area was covered in black and then erased back to produce the image.
Some experiments with using a black background.
Top left: White conté.
Top Right: White acrylic, using only horizontal strokes.
Bottom Left: White acrylic, I tried to paint out ‘pixels’ of colour however the black base I used kept bleeding into the paint I was laying down.
Black ink over wax scribblings.