Experimenting with Texture

As i think most of us have done i have done rubbings with a pencil and piece of paper as a child over things like coins and wood etc but i had never heard of it referred to as "Frottage" before.

For this exercise i split my sketch pad up into 8 sections, 4 of these sections would be for my frottage and the other 4 sections i am going to try and recreate the same effect using different mediums.

I decided to use two natural items and 2 man-made items and in both categories have 1 that was hard and 1 that was soft. The natural items i chose were a wooden beam and a leaf, the man-made items were a concrete slab and an artist canvas.


To take all of the rubbings i used a 2B graphite pencil.

For the wooden table the grain didn't come out as clear as i would have liked but i think that is because the paper i used was too thick (for the others i swapped to a lighter weight paper). I tried to recreate the texture of the wood by still using the 2B pencil but actually drawing the grain i could see, over all i was quite happy with the result.


The leaf was my favourite and most successful rubbing but my least favourite recreation. I tried using Indian Ink and water to get the soft veins of the leaf but this didn't come out as i hoped it would and it looks dark and heavy, i may go back to this at another time and try other mediums.


The concrete slab gave a good strong rubbing with lots of texture and i am pleased overall with my recreation of it. I used oil pastels in dots over the paper then smudge it with my fingers to create the texture of the concrete.

The stretched canvas also gave a good strong texture and i copied this texture with pencil but in much the same way as i had with the concrete. I used lots of dots on the paper then smudged them with my figure before gong back in and adding small faint dashes to show the weave of the material. Again i was quite pleased with the outcome of this.


I enjoyed doing this exercise and think i may incorporate some frottage in some of my pieces going forward as its a great way of getting the texture of an object.

Comments

Popular Posts