Project 4 Developing Design Ideas - Stage 4

Drawings for Stage 4 are of two old medecine bottles bought at an antique market in Cheshire for pennies.  One is brown and one is green and they look pretty ancient.  The brown one still has some suspicious looking powder in it and a label on that reads 'Ext. Filicis Liq. P.B.' which I've just been informed by google is an extract of male fern used to expel tapeworms!

First I used the single line technique, on the right I wasn't looking at what I was doing and on the left I was.  Below that is a proper sketching using a 2B and some colour experiments at the side in various colours.  When it came to working throught the design approach first of all I made a watercolour painting of the bottles, I experimented with different media to see which would achieve the colours that I was after, I liked what I achieved with oil pastel the best, the more and more I use oil pastels the more I enjoy them.  

Next I made a pencil drawing of the shapes that appealed to me in the painting, which was the area between the two bottle necks.  Based on this I drew the shapes in oil pastel, because I really liked the intensity of colour that I was able to get from them.  After this I reworked the same shapes using collaged magazine papers.  You cant see it terribly well in this photo but I also made a tile based on the shapes and did some tesselations (not entirely accurately) in the background.  While I enjoyed this, I do find it very difficult to work in this design based way rather than in an illustrative one and this stage began to highlight that for me.