Drawing – Week 2
I delayed writing this post, maily because it’s not as visually rewarding as some of the others. Last Tuesday’s Drawing class was mostly based on exercises.
First, we drew an irregular shape. Then we had to copy the shape onto a piece of paper of the same size as the original shape:
When that was done, we superimposed the two shapes, to see how well we replicated the original shape:
As you can see, mine’s ok, although far from perfect.
Then we had to draw a hollow tube and shade it in, making it obvious that it’s hollow. I think mine turned out, well, fairly tube-like:
And this is the magnum opus of the evening, which took me maybe an hour to get right:
That’s right, an…egg. Don’t knock it til you try it! It’s way harder than it seems. One of the main problems is that you can’t just draw the egg as you see it (we were each given a real egg to draw). You have to capture the inner egg-ness of the egg; the egg, to be recognisable as an egg, has to be an ideal egg that Plato himself would be proud of. My egg had a groove in the middle, as though the hen had changed her mind about expelling it halfway through the process. Had I drawn this groove, however, the egg would have ceased to be recognisable as an egg, since eggs “don’t have grooves down the middle”. So I downplayed the groove, and focused on the idea of an egg. This, in a way, is the opposite to many of the exercises we’ve been doing, where realism has given way to details and observation – instead, being an exercise in suppressing accurate observation.
The evening ended with a series of sketches of a papier mache duck, in quick succession (~30 seconds per sketch). We were asked to use expressive lines, convey detail but with fewer pencil strokes than that blasted egg, obviously. I really enjoyed this exercise, and my favourite duck is the second one from the left on the middle row (and yes, the model was pretty deformed to begin with):
At first I was unsure of how much I could convey in the time given, so the first few ducks are very basic. As I became used to the short intervals, I began adding more detail.
Next week I think we start on drawing with ink – yay!
