Ashley Yau

To deal with the creative block I was experiencing I decided to go out for a walk around my neighbourhood to look for inspiration for task 1. What I love most about Wembley Park is how pedestrian friendly it is and how the area is always busy with families and students going about their day. There’s a nice balance of modern buildings and greenery coexisting. 

For this task, I experimented with watercolour, gouache, markers, colour pencils and oil pastels. Some of the drawings were done outdoors as there was plenty of seating with tables for me to use and some were done in my room. For the base I used cartridge paper, watercolour paper and colour paper. I decided to draw what I saw often going about my daily life here, the view I see on my walks to the grocery store, the prints I see on people’s clothes as they walk by me and the greenery around Wembley Stadium when I take a walk in the afternoon to clear my head. Whilst on a walk, I met Jenny, a mural artist who was working on painting murals with nature motifs on electrical boxes around Wembley Park and enjoyed seeing her progress everyday as she completed her murals day by day.

I liked how it wasn’t too hard for me to start my work as there were many different colours and textures for me to pick up on and use mixed media materials to create my drawings. There were also many murals and artwork for me to take inspiration from. For example, the murals being created by Jenny and the concrete blocks that have art work by Mr Doodle on them in front of my local Sainsbury’s. It felt very freeing to be able to just spread out my art supplies on a park bench and just start drawing with whatever medium I could get my hands on. Quickly scribbling whatever was in my view before the weather would turn for the worst. I rarely used oil pastels and markers before this and it was fun to learn how to work with these new mediums as opposed to water colour which is what I usually use.

Overall, this task has taught me how to be spontaneous with my art and be able to draw inspiration from my immediate surroundings. It has also enabled me to not overthink about how nice or perfect my art looks and focus more on creating art based on how I see and feel the world around me. 

Borough market