Think of a person for whom you have strong feelings or hold a strong opinion.  Find an object or item of clothing that reminds you of that person.  Make a piece of artwork that uses the object to provide the imagery but uses the materials to give the viewer a sense of the person.  In effect, you’re making a portrait of a person as an item of clothing…..  Experiment widely and produce as many pieces as you need to until you arrive at something which you think fits.

When I read this, I immediately thought of my mother, who passed away last year.  I don’t have any of her clothing, but I have some belongings.  I decided to do a still life with some of her things that were normally at her bedside; a china bowel usually filled with boiled sweets, her watch, a vase of roses and a bottle of Irn Bru.  I decided to go off track from the brief slightly, and instead of describing my mother, I would try to describe my feelings towards her, i.e. grief, love, sadness etc.

I was thinking of doing a still life with things that remind me of my Mum.  I put a vase of roses next to a bottle of Irn Bru (which she was never without), and did a loose pen and wash sketch.  I wanted the colours to be sombre, so used Indigo in the back ground, and used lots of water so that the black ink of the drawing ran into the colours.

I struggled with the Irn Bru bottle a little, so had another go on its own this time.  I even tried a wash with Irn Bru, but disappointingly it disappeared completely.

I’m also enjoying drawing the roses so have been experimenting with those too.

The bowl was used by my mum as a sweetie bowl, so gave that a try too.

I kept being drawn to the china bowl, as it reminds me so much of her, so I started another sketch of it on its own.

This was done with a cheap black fibre tip that is water-soluble.

To this I added watercolour washes with lots of water added, so that the paint ran down the paper.  I wanted to convey sadness and tears.  To test the success of this I posted it on the Facebook page OCA Sketchbooks and asked what mood or emotion it conveyed.   The responses I got were; sad, under the weather, sadness and lamenting, sad and gloomy, passage of time, very feminine + very emotionally depicted without over sentimentality, sad and lost, sadness, loss, faded memories and tears of grief, reminds me of Chinese or Japanese style, grief, inquiring, decorative, the runs are like tears and the colours are sombre so I immediately thought of weeping and sadness, you have conveyed the emotion in an effective (and affecting) way, sad, melancholy, weepy, really sad, nostalgia the sad kind. 

This is exactly what I was attempting, so I decided to leave it at that; one simple drawing of one object, rendered in such a way that it conveys my feelings towards the person it belonged to.