What is drawing for?

As a textiles student, my drawings are used primarily to gather as much information about a subject as possible before developing and translating them into a piece of textiles. Since being on this course, I have found my attitude to drawing has changed. I'm now being asked to consider and record interesting qualities of line, pattern, tone, form and texture; This was hard to get to grips with at first as I was used to producing 'finished' pieces of work rather than allowing myself to be more free with what I drew. There were many techniques we were asked to use such as 'continuous line', 'blind continuous line', 'stencils' and 'collaborative drawing' - all of which had no more than a 10 minute time limit which helped to free up our hand and mind.

The drawing above was one of thirty I was asked to produce for a project called 'Indexing the Personal and Impersonal'. I used a ruler to draw with, collaged some areas and worked on black paper as not to be daunted by a big white space! This drawing may seem naive at first glance, and before I started this course I would have thought so too, but recently I have come to realise that not every drawing i produce has to be technically accurate for it to be of use - in fact this one was probably more of use to me than if i had spent a week trying to draw the bottle and can opener perfectly! This drawing can be seen as technically wrong in terms of perspective and scale, but it has played a major part of the development in my project and eventually, this drawing will have served a purpose when it is turned into a functional piece of fabric.