DOMESTIKA COURSE – ISLAMIC ART – TRACING AND BIOMORPHS
I have skipped the final task in the previous unit because of time constraints. I’ve had a busy week, and I want to take advantage of the afternoon daylight in the studio for drawing, and not waste it sitting at the laptop in the sitting room. I shall return to it in due course.
Drawing the design on the grid
These Domestika courses seem to have quite a bit of introductory material and background research to do before beginning on the actual project. It is always good to get down to the serious work!
Now we have completed the grid based on an eight-pointed star, it is time to add the details of the final art work.
Tracing
I do not consider that I am violating the terms of the course by showing my work, or detailing how the tracing is done, because there are numerous videos online which show this process, with variations.
The idea is that you draw one section of the design on tracing paper, reverse it and trace it again to produce a mirror image. In this case we began with a one-sixteenth sector.
A frustrating afternoon
I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon struggling with this. Esra, our teacher, suggested we followed along with her as she drew the shapes and commented on what she was doing. However, it was really difficult to see, because for most of the time the closer shots were done from the side, and the few overhead ones were too small to see. She also suggested that we used the various pdfs of the design. I printed these out but they were very small, and when I tried to enlarge them, they pixelated badly, obliterating most of the detail. There were two versions – one seemed to be drawn from the original manuscript illumination, and this was extremely complex. The other one was the simplified version that Esra had drawn for the course. However, both of them included the extension above the basic medallion which was part of the original manuscript, and the underlying circles of the grid didn’t seem to agree with what she instructed us to draw. On one of them, these circles were not even concentric. When I tried to plot out the shapes, the A3 sheet was not big enough to include the whole of the extension. I failed to realise that she wasn’t including the extension of the design, and when I tried to incorporate it, judging as best as I could which actual circles the design was based on, the design of the medallion came out far too small, and there was no way I could double any of the lines for painting and outlining. I tried working from a zoomed-in version of the image on the pdf on screen, but I couldn’t get the whole thing on the screen if it was going to be large enough to see the detail, and I couldn’t get it the same size as my drawing. I even tried using my proportional divider to get the placing of the various shapes correct, but anyway my drawing was too small. In the end I had to give up, feeling very frustrated and wondering how on earth this was supposed to work, and come down and think about other things, like making supper.
In the evening I decided to have a look at the forum associated with the course, and see what others had done. It was then that I realised that the extensions were omitted in every case, making the drawable area much larger.
Progress at last
This afternoon I settled down again, having realised that what we were drawing did not include the extensions. I abandoned the idea of trying to follow the printed designs which were too small and too muddled to be of any use. Instead, I attempted once again to follow Esra’s instructions on her video.
I taped the first piece of tracing paper over the grid and marked the edges with ruled lines. Seeing through the tracing paper to the grid beneath, I was able to place the basic shapes of the design on the tracing paper.
The drawing was painstaking, with many erasures before I got it more or less right.
1st tracing – the initial drawing
Here is the initial drawing, a one-sixteenth sector of the whole circle.
2nd tracing – the mirror image
What we had to do was to lay another piece of tracing paper on top of the one taped onto the grid, tape it down, and trace it again.
You then end up with two identical drawings, which when placed side by side with the pencil lines uppermost, are not mirror images.
We turned the second one over and lined up the tracing with the first one, to check that everything was OK, and that all the elements along the division lined up correctly. Any small errors were corrected at this stage.
At this stage I was drawing with the 2H graphite pencil I’d used throughout for drawing the grid.
3rd tracing – completing one-eighth of the design
This method means that you end up with several pieces of tracing paper, and you choose the one with the complete one-eighth of the design. We took another piece of tracing paper and traced the design once more.
Here is my final tracing, complete with some added biomorphs. These are not arranged symmetrically but are drawn randomly where there is space on the design.
After closing for the day, I had time to think about the way forward, and eventually decided to redo the tracing, using a different method. Please go to the next blog post to see the result.
