Chernobyl - Pripyat

 12/12/20 - Week 10

This piece was an incredibly tricky one to create, I struggle with colour on paper and I felt that struggle strongly here.

I first started by laying down a base sketch in pencil, I don’t think the composition and basic structure of the piece is too bad and I think if this piece ended up being more successful it would have looked interesting and definitely reflective of an apocalyptic scene. I chose to sketch on a light peach paper, I wanted to contrast this with the blues, reflective of the cold and abandoned nature of the scene.

After laying down some basic colour, I sort of realised how difficult this was going to be. I was using quite a small palette of hard pastilles and some charcoal to create this piece. The pastilles felt not very precise and I couldn’t quite capture the colours I wanted as obviously they weren’t going to be the same as the ones in the original image, this is something I’m not very good at coping with.

I started to lay down some more colour and added some more purple and reds to the scene to try to pull it together, this seemed to help a bit and make the piece feel a bit more cohesive. I started to struggle with the fact the pastilles weren’t able to produce intricate markings and this ended up making the piece rather clumsy and appear heavy handed. I’d perhaps try to bring in some coloured pencil next time as this might help me to place in these smaller details, unfortunately I didn’t have any with me at the time of drawing this.

To try to add some smaller details I brought in some chalk, it didn’t help the way I wanted it to as it would blend too much sometimes but it definitely helped to break up some areas such as the walls and the chairs. I found myself not too sure how to progress with the piece often at this stage as I couldn’t get the detail I wanted, especially in the background.

I feel I have left this piece still looking a bit unfinished, but I did try hard with it to get it to a standard that I am happy with even though working with these materials is difficult for me. I think if I could have figured out a way to take it further I would have been more pleased with it, but I felt that pastilles were quite limiting in the style I was going for.