Civitella

We went to Civitella Italy for a week. It was a great great experience.

The point of the trip was to do drawing but I also managed to improve my german and learned a lot of cool new 'slang' words and a touch of italian (spoken with an awful english accent).

We drove up on the 27th April and the journey lasted from 5:30- like 8pm. It was long but nice to go through all the different places and be on the road. Left on sat and arrived back in Darm sunday morning.

When we got there it was really nothing like I expected. It's a really old rustic town on a hill which was pretty much deserted other than the visiting students with lots of vast landscape views over short windy brick walls.

On the first full day we all met up in the studio and discussed our plans for the week. My plan was to draw lots and lots and just somehow fit everything together at the end.

I started drawing focussing on perspectives and then tried to be a bit more looser using ink and oil pastels and experimenting a bit with colour. I also kept another small sketchbook doing simple line drawings. I had some feedback from my tutor suggesting to continue this and using small squared paper format and just make lots of these sketches to fill up the wall space so this is what I did for the entire week.

Although I usually enjoy using a more experimental approach it was good for me to do be able to do something with a kind of predictable outcome because it was really good for me to be able to focus and develop this style of drawing and manipulate specifics like where I filled in shadows and the layout etc. This way of working really worked for me and I was able to work really solidly, almost obsessively. I think I feel like it has been a good development because i've found it hard to be able to express what I want to communicate and get distracted by the main concept, but this week really proved to me the importance of basic drawing and the what interests me/ the way I see.

It was also good, as always, to see the way that other people were working. I really like working in a studio in close proximity of other people but also being able to have my own space.

Pics can be found on my tumblr http://thestuffclub.tumblr.com/