248 Drawings in 2 Days?!

For a recent COP task, creating an A2 poster, I sat down on Bank Holiday weekend and did 248 drawings in two days (as well as finishing all my COP blogging and essay on the Monday). I feel after coming out the other side of this experience I've learnt a lot about myself.

Firstly, that I'm a lot faster as my craft than I was at the beginning of the year. I remember being daunted and shocked during the first week of term in which we were required to do 260 drawings in a week. 260 in a week!? That was crazy! It was exhausting and difficult and I think I still fell about 30 drawings short. However last weekend proved how not only faster I've become at drawing, but how much more efficient and organised. I had to plan out my weekend so that I would have all my practical work done by the Tuesday morning, ready to then scan in and organise ready to then print on Wednesday morning.

And so on Saturday and Sunday I worked twelve hour days with minimal breaks (for things like food, water, toilet) and completed 90 drawings on Saturday (80 scamps and 10 final images) and 158 drawings on Sunday (120 scamps and 38 final images). This task was self initiated. For my final poster I need 48 images in total, and I didn't want these images to just be the first things that I thought of, so I started doing scamps for each of these images. On the Saturday I was doing about 7-10 scamps per image; on Sunday I knew I had to streamline this process in order to get it all finished and so limited myself to 3 scamps in frames for each image. I wanted to do this because I wanted my final images to reflect what I wanted to say about my subject matter, and while sometimes the first idea I had did this better than the others, often I found a much more suitable way of communicating what I wanted to say through later scamps and exploration of ideas.

Though this task was hugely exhausting I found that by maintaining a good amount of sleep and eating well I didn't feel burnt out by the end of it; in fact I felt rather accomplished. I believe this self driven mini mega project has shown me what I'm capable of if I just sit down and concentrate on illustrating without distractions.

Some of the scamps done during the two days