Final Date 14th February 2012!

This is it – the finale to the Drawing Project – well at least for the time being!

I am inviting you to take part in the Distant Stitch Drawing Competition – with lovely prizes -

• A £50 Voucher towards a Module of any Distant Stitch Course for you or a friend to be used in 2012.
• A £25 voucher from Art Van Go (See Trusted Traders section on www.distantstitch.co.uk)
• A £25 voucher from Ario  (See Trusted Traders section on www.distantstitch.co.uk)

This competition is open to any one who is a non-professional artist, whether you are a Distant Stitch student or not.

There will be three jurors – Jan Evans (Distant Summer School tutor), Viv White (Distant Stitch Creative Sketchbooks tutor) and myself, Sian Martin.

After judging, a selection of the submitted drawings will be posted on a special gallery on the Distant Stitch website along with links to your blog.

The title or theme of your drawings is “Looking Into”.

Take a look around your home and see how many spaces you could be ‘Looking Into’. This could be a very small space such as a tiny container such as a purse or a larger space such as a room that you could ‘peep into’ through a doorway or window. Find a space that contains ‘things’ – bags, baskets, rooms, boxes, cupboard, pocket, a corner of a room, your potting shed. Take time to decide on your space and make sure it will be easily accessible to you over the next couple of months. The contents of your space could change with time, objects get moved around or removed just like any useful container.

Here are a few views I might consider around my house -

the sock drawer,  crockery cupboard, sewing kit, box of screws, a treasured bag of rocks from the Negev Desert,

a peep inside my old chemist’s drawers, looking inside from outside,  wardrobe, pen pot, re-cycling items and a butternut squash!

Use your initiative and find something you would find interesting to draw over a period of a few weeks that you could be ‘Looking Into’.
The Competition is to produce -
A SERIES OF DRAWINGS BASED ON ‘LOOKING INTO’

• 
  The judging criteria will be based on good observational skills and appropriate and imaginative use of media.
• Make a series of drawings in your sketchbook which should be two dimensional and less than A4 so each page can be scanned .
• You can use any media you like or combinations of media and any ground surface on your pages. Your drawings should not be considered a resolved ‘work of art’ but a series of studies of your chosen space based on ‘LOOKING INTO’. A sketchbook page can contain several small studies or close-ups or just one drawing.
• You can produce as many pages in your sketchbook as you like but should select at least 6 and no more than 10 of your best.

• Post between 6 and 10 scanned sketchbook pages in one continuous posting on your blog on ANY ONE day between 1st and 14th February 2012.
  
• Send an email to Sian with a link to your blog posting by 14th February.
• The Jurors will look at all submitted blogs and the results will be announced on 1st March 2012.

GETTING STARTED

You could make a start by doing some preliminary drawings as studies to help you get to know small areas of your chosen subject.

You might find it fun to take some photographs of your chosen space and play with different effects to help your eye to see it in an interesting, less obvious way.

Here are a few digital ‘thoughts’ from a heap of crockery inside my kitchen cupboard. These digital effects suggest many different media and ways of seeing these forms.

This is an interesting preliminary exercise but digital drawings or imagery cannot be submitted in your final series.