Exercise - Visual distortion.

Part 1. Draw a dog, I chose Archie, the highly-trained 5-month-old wonder dog mainly because of his unique posing skills. The task was to draw him in a way that made him 'real' and I tried to get over a sense of his personality.

As you can see from the pic, Archie is a Border Terrier with a kindly disposition. He's friendly with all animals and humans and his only vice (so far) is that he likes to 'christen' people he really likes with a sprinkling of 'wee'. I obviously chose to leave this particular trait of his out of the picture. Archie lives in hope of joining the police or armed forces as an attack dog, but as he is (a) not remotely aggressive and (b) doesnt know how to bark, its not looking good...

Next I had a go at trying to draw Archie in a limited number of lines and kept getting involved in 'detail' but did manage to do the image above in the middle of the page. 

I then did a line drawing and then tried to simplify my lines using the very minimum and came up with 

the sketches below which seemed to work better.

I think the two sketches above still manage to retain a feel for his personality and character.

Collage version.

Above are simplified line drawings using Illustrator and a bit of colour. Its interesting how simplifying the image can make such a difference to the finished article. The blue ones in particular using limited number of lines. Whilst drawing Archie I became more aware of his black rings around his eyes and nose which reminded me of a mask so I worked on the collage below.

'Fang'.

I used bread for his shoulders, hedgehog hair for some of his body parts and some ladies bikini bottoms  for his head. The icing on the cake and the source of his supposed super power comes from the fact that his ears have been made from Rachel Stevens abdomen...

The dog-pound always came out in force
if Fang was involved....

I have recently discovered the artist, Peter Clark, on t'internet who, it appears is a bit of a Jedi in the realms of collage, and to make it even more relevant, he does dogs (not literally). 

Peter uses a comprehensive collection of found papers as his palette which are coloured, patterned or textured by their printed, written or worn surfaces, with this media he 'paints' his collages. He shades with density of print and creates substance and movement with lines plucked from old maps or manuscripts. His pieces use mark-making in an innovative and humorous way to create a collection of beasts and clothing which exude character and wit.

Check out www.peterclarkcollage.com to see his other brilliant work.