Concerning the first two photo’s, this was when I particularly started focusing on the whole idea of figure. I decided to firstly draw a woman in it’s nude form, which I found particularly fascinating to sketch as I got to understand the proportions of a body when in a certain position. I found it a good challenge considering she was also curled up and yet also sprawled out, and it was interesting to figure out how and where to shade around the body. 
  I began drawing the skeletal figure of a typical human being at the beginning of my project also, to get a deeper and further understanding of the anatomy of a human’s body, to realise where things should be and how to get the proportions and measurements right when sketching figure. I found it particularly helpful and really increased my knowledge and understanding of where joints are and where things should be placed when drawing figure. 
  After looking at a few artists, such as Jenny Saville, I found her art work astounding and wanted to look into some of her work a bit more, in different ways. I found her way of contorting how the body is perceived from ‘unflattering’ angles quite fascinating and I found a self portrait she did of her lying on the floor particularly lovely. I wanted to study it and work on it in a different style, though. I’d also been studying different ways of painting by other artists, and one technique was speed painting. This is when you get all the major details down as quick as possible and essentially don’t let your pencil or paintbrush stop touching paper. I decided to paint one of Jenny Saville’s paintings in this style and I found it really interesting getting her major features down really quickly and then rapidly painting to also achieve the correct effect. 
  The paintings of the hand and eye were also based on the whole idea of figure, although I was also looking more into surrealism whilst painting the eye so decided to add numbers that are seen on clocks within the pupil to represent time flying right before your eyes. The painting of my hand is something I’m quite proud of, I was looking at flesh tones and realised there are more colours within flesh than one would expect, such as blues and greens.
  The last one is also quite similar to the painting I did of the Jenny Saville painting in the way that I was looking at speed drawing and painting. This was something I did mostly as initial practice but found quite interesting to do. We had someone model five or less minutes at a time, changing their pose a little each time, ensuring that we simply focus on all the key things that need to be drawn. It also helped us quickly make our mind figure out how to draw a figure in these positions in the correct proportions with very little time to contemplate about it all in your mind. This helped greatly and helped me get a greater understanding of the time you actually need to draw the main idea of a picture. 

This drawing was produced as I began to practice and focus on figure and still life. One main area that I found particularly interesting was nude figure, and the way the human body can look in different positions, especially curled up and how the body can wrap up itself. I found a website with several photos for nude figure with people posed in all different types of positions and in different environments. As this was my first piece based on figure and still life I simply picked a woman lying on the floor, curled up to hide herself. I found this photo particularly fascinating, and even more interesting to draw. Drawing and shading with her skin was interesting to sketch in black and white tones. 

Focusing predominantly on the concept of positive and negative in this particular project, I was to think of ideas dealing with that. One film I had seen which clearly depicted the change between positive and negative not only emotionally, but mentally and physically was the film ‘Black Swan’. The key idea throughout the movie was a woman’s change as she thrives for attention and perfection after being given a main role in a ballet performance, but she struggles to be as naturally fluent as her rival. Throughout the movie she begins to hallucinate frequently and over the course of the film starts to find her dark side deep within her that blossoms out towards the end, resulting in her own death. She begins as an innocent woman still treated as a child by her mother and ends up the complete opposite by the end because of her thirst for perfection. I thought this was a perfect film and opportunity to paint a clear image of both her sides, and my ideas developed with this concept into a final piece based on her character, too. I wanted to show simply both her sides within one person and how much of a physical impact it has on her as she changes from the innocent ‘white swan’ to the dark, insane ‘black swan’.