Ellipses and Symmetry

 

This week's task was a fun challenge for me as I have always found round objects difficult to draw accurately. For this project, I chose to draw a mug, a wax melt and a candle in a glass jar. I initially started this drawing by doing a quick thumbnail sketch, which I will display below, to make sure I understood the composition and perspectives correctly. This helped me to progress onto my actual piece where I firstly drew each object one by one, using oval ellipses to attempt to accurately get the correct proportions for my items. There were a few issues I faced whilst doing this; I realised that I kept drawing the ellipses with pointed edges either side which looked incorrect when I observed my still life set up once again. Therefore, I made sure that I corrected this error and that my piece looked slightly more true to form. Furthermore, for this piece, I really wanted to focus on bold shading techniques as some of my previous feedback indicated that some of my pieces looked too monochromatic. This is something I attempted to improve this time. I found the mug particularly challenging as it is a very dark shade of blue. Therefore, trying to shade in the shadows and highlights along with the pattern was challenging. Observing shades of colour and then relaying them using pencil is something I would like to take forward and work on. I received some feedback on this piece during a lecture and found that were some issues regarding the bottom of the objects. This is something I attempted to correct in my second pass.

This is my 5 minute thumbnail sketch that I completed so that I could get an idea of the basic tones and shapes before I started on my final piece. This helped me to get used to drawing the round ellipses rather than the ones with the pointed edges. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this week's task as it helped me to gain more confidence with my shading rather than being so light with it. My perspective skills could still be improved upon and this is something I will be paying attention to going forward.

XYZ Section drawing

 

This week's task was the XYZ section drawing which was something very new to me. This task took me a while to figure out and it took me a few attempts to be able to accurately use the XYZ sector grid I had drawn to help with the drawing of my Doc Martin boot. Once I had started to understand how to correctly use it, it really helped me to create an accurate sketch of the boot. I found the top of the boot the most difficult to draw as the grid confused me at first. I wanted to leave this sketch as mostly a line drawing with some basic shading to represent changes in shade or object, such as the laces. My aim was to make it look 3D as accurately as possible using the section grid without the use of shading.

This was my initial attempt to work out how to use the XYZ grid in order to accurately draw a 3D boot with all the correct proportions. As you can see at the top, I also did a very basic orthographic sketch so that it would help me visualise how each face would look in relation to one another. For this drawing, I spent a long time looking at the boot itself trying to work out how each part would correspond to each angle of the boot. My thumbnail sketches made it a lot easier to draw when it came to my final piece of work for this week's task. I think that, going forward, I would like to challenge myself and draw some other more complex objects using this method. I would be interested to see what other 3D shapes I could draw with the section grid.