Kitchen corners

For the last couple of days I have been doing some pencil sketches of kitchen corners – none that great – most have quite a lot going on in them – lots of separate elements which I found difficult to relate to one another. I used a cardboard frame to help narrow the focus.

Here are a selection of those drawings. The first (kitchen corner 1) was awkward to produce and came across quite scratchy where I had pressed too hard with the initial lines. The next one (kitchen corner 2) is a bit better I think – a lot softer – I used a 3B rather than 2B to rough out the shapes, but its very unfinished.

I did the next picture this evening – there were two main objects making it easier to focus more attention on them. It’s bolder than the others, but not a very careful drawing. What I was hoping with this one was to get some sense of realism while keeping the pencil markings fairly obvious – which came across in the earlier drawing I did of the wall socket (‘Some more careful drawings’ blogpost – posted 28th May). You can see the pencil markings in the shading of the wall in that earlier drawing – I liked that and wanted to get a similar effect here again (by using the blunt point of a 6B pencil rather than its side) – I didn’t want the picture to be too perfect.

I liked the toaster but the kettle didn’t work quite so well – it got a bit smeared and scratchy. Again, similar to my experience with pen and ink, leaving blank white space against the dark pencil markings (achieved on the toaster) created a much more dramatic effect than adding dark markings on the kettle and then trying to remove with a nornal eraser and then a putty eraser to create the highlights. The latter approach seems to work much better with charcoal when I did that big A1 drawing of the bookcase.