Observation Journal: Project reviews for silhouettes and portraits

Two more project-review pages of the observation journal.

For previous examples see the project review category, and for a list of questions I ask, see Questions for Project Reviews.

The first was for my silhouettes for Chain of Iron by Cassandra Clare (the process post about those illustrations is here: Art Process — Chain of Iron).

I identified two important lessons on this project:

• I really like links within projects, physical and metaphorical, final effect and process. I’ve written about this previously — see, for example, On Silhouettes and Further Points of Connection, and The Key to All Mythologies — cultivating spurious links.
• Tools need to be good and in good condition. The difference between newly sharp and poorly resharpened blades is the difference between cutting butter with a hot knife and gnawing through a branch with your teeth. But so is the difference between two different manufacturer’s blades.

The next review is for the portraits I did for the Queensland Literary Awards. My interview about those is up on the SLQ website: A Conversation with Kathleen Jennings.

A few key lessons from this:

• Build panic into my planning — it’s part of the process.
• Plan to do multiple versions/”throwaway” versions — permission to throw a piece out it makes me loosen up a lot and occasionally removes the need to.
• Price originals before finding out if people want them. (Thank you Gavin Grant for lessons around this!)
• The difficulty I have with portrait work from photos (static reference, some degree of likeness required) can be offset to a degree by requesting photos with pets in them (adds life to the pose, adds movement/character, distracts the viewer).
• The need to practice aspects (e.g. skin tones) in advance, when working with limited materials and colours. Usually with the sketchbook and markers I’m relying a lot more on strong light and context hints than I can for static portraiture, even in a sketchy style.
• While I get tense about portrait work, I love and miss documentary sketching — it’s reminded me to steer more towards the latter, and suggest it vs traditional portraits. In fact, the next job I did for the State Library was documentary sketching: Next Library.

Portraits of Queensland Literary Award winners Yen-Rong Wong, Tabitha Bird, and Joey Bui

I also learned a few lessons about project reviews generally:

• I retain end-of-project lessons better than day-to-day ones (I have theories), which makes these reviews very useful.
• Many of the small details help me usefully answer those tricky little questions in bios, etc, (what do you find difficult to draw?) as well as giving direction for specific projects and techniques in future (the original point).
• A project review can itself become the basis for an article, whether about a specific piece (e.g. A Conversation with Kathleen Jennings) or more generally. For example, I’m starting to think about a piece on my experience portraiture, and aspects of both these project reviews (fictional silhouette portraits, stylised portraits of real people) will get into it.
• Highlighting the most important notes (in the moment) is very helpful.

For other posts about project reviews, see the project review category, and for a list of questions I ask, see Questions for Project Reviews.

reading on the sofa

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Observation Journal: Questions for project reviews

Project reviews have been a useful aspect of the observation journal. These aren’t productivity/time-management types of reviews. They are about going back over the patterns in my own work, picking up threads I want to follow in the future, recording the epiphanies I always have and quickly forget. (See also previous project review posts for how they’ve evolved.)

I had by now done enough of these reviews that I knew the questions which worked best for me. Yours may vary, but here is the tidied-up version of mine. I’ve printed them out and keep them at the back of my notebook.

Questions for project review:

• The common questions:
  • Things that worked / things I was happy with
  • Things I disliked / could do better
  • Difficulties
  • Things to try in future / ideas I had while doing the project
  • Why did I choose this? What alternatives didn’t I pursue?
  • What did I leave out / evade / avoid?
  • Tendencies I noticed / things I resisted
  • [Added 21/8/22] Ideals
• The occasional questions:
  • How did I get it started/finished
  • What was the process I followed
  • Specific lessons I learned
  • How did people respond?
  • If I did this exact project again, what would I do differently?
  • If I never do a project like this again, which aspects would I try to find/use in other projects?
  • Could I have streamlined a difficult/unlikeable part, or found someone else to do it?

Here are three examples:

The first is a review of the August 2020 Wildflower calendar art.

It was useful to record the process because I do these calendar pages so often, and yet I’m always startled by how long certain aspects (getting started, colour flats) take me. It also let me identify a couple of techniques that I wanted to learn.

The next was for a tiny story I had written for a few patrons, “Shadowmill”.

It was good, here, to work out why this story caught my interest (promise, episodic, aesthetic), and what appealed and didn’t about a less-usual way of working: the unpredictability of it, and the potential of the elongated shape.

The next page was a review of the drawings I did in the window at Avid Reader to promote Flyaway.

Drawing on a window was a new technique for me. Much of this, therefore, was to record some very practical (and often, in retrospect, obvious) lessons about cleaning glass first, etc.

A couple of the big ones:

• Keeping plans flexible and drawing freehand was a very good idea when I’m familiar with the style/subject matter but not the exact space I could use or the materials— I was less stressed and able to change things on the fly.
• Drawing is physical and large drawings more so.
• Make sure someone else is getting photos.
• When drawing (especially drawing large) in public:
  • have someone delegated to update social media as you go, because people got really into it; and
  • have a sign telling people who is drawing and why.

You can see previous project-review posts under the category project review.

Note: If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) and patrons there get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1, or you could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel (and I get through quite a bit of coffee).And/or check out prints and products available at Redbubble and Spoonflower.