3 Dimensional Window Collage

Depth

The task: To create a collage of the view out of a window at uni to create depth/perspective through different layers

I felt in the mood to do some really chunky graphite drawings. I found a nice window which had a window sill at a good hight to draw from.

I started off by drawing the diggers. This was quite a challenge as they were in action and kept moving! 

 I then decided to do a full drawing of the view. This was useful to try and figure out what was the foreground and the background. however i didn't draw things right in the distance so it became clear that there was more than just a foreground and background, there were about 6 different layers.

 Then I tried to capture the dirt pile and the different bumps through stronger and lighter line work-very roughly and graphite was the perfect medium for this.

 I then went back to draw more diggers..

 This was another feature. The barricade between the pavement and the heaped mud. This is quite a stylised drawing of this but I thought it was interesting and should be included.

 Here I focussed in soley on what I could see in the distance.. I didn't want to over complicate it so kept to a limited use of lines.

 Then I added seperate features which i could see right in the distance and drew them larger than the rest which i realised when drawing but decided to draw them larger than the rest because they were interesting features and at the end of the day it didn't even need to be realistic.

 I then began to cut out the different sections of the drawings I had already done. I was debating whether to redraw everything in colour however I like the loosens of the line quality from the graphite and thought it would be best left as a tonal image.

 As I complied my cut out drawings I realised that not everything fit together in proportion which was fine but I needed to add some more drawings to the collage. It also spanned over a strange amount of paper, it took 3 pages of a2 to arrange everything how I wanted it. In fact I had to take to the floor to have enough space.
At this point I felt like a child that had done some really childish drawings and had to take a break and come back because I felt that it looked really messy.

 I decided that the digger at the very front needed to be on some mud but thought that to add tonal variation it should be on darker soil and not to fill the whole foreground with dark charcoal to give the image some space because it is quite crowded. I also added buildings in the background but filled them in with lines which created a texture rather than totally fill them in so that it didn't look too dark and busy.

I had compiled everything together but felt that something was missing and decided that the totally white sky/background looked strange so I added some line work to this and i got really lovely texture from the graphite picking up bumps from the floor.
The next challenge was sticking down all of the layers! I ended up with 17 cut out pieces of paper which were already played down and it was quite a challenge knowing where to begin! I also wanted it to fit in a frame so positioned everything into a square and used a ripped up border to figure out where to place everything.

I am quite pleased with this outcome. I feel that it is very different from what I normally do, mainly because it is not perfect and quite loose. Someone said that they thought it was my best bit of work and others seemed to like it. I therefore came out of uni feeling very positive. I think also the scale of the image is quite important because it is busy with many layers but the size makes it approachable to the eye.