Came back to drawing a corner of the kitchen again as wasn’t satisfied with what I had done before – again I had to make several attempts to get the relationship between different objects right. Here are some preliminary sketches I did followed by the final piece.
Some bits are still not quite right in the final drawing – the smaller ring of the oven needs to be further to the right. I quite like the application of tone, but it breaks down a bit with the bottles – it’s difficult to see exactly what is going on there in the drawing – I think drawing this bigger would have got round this which might have enabled me to pay greater attention to the detail of bottles.
I didn’t use any rubbing out this time to get across reflective surfaces, but just left highlighted pieces blank. I think doing the pen and ink drawings was quite good training for this.
I did the initial sketching out with 4B pencil because i liked the softer outlines this produced. I added tone with both 4B and 6B but bizarely found that adding final touches for detail and smoothing over tone with a 2B pencil worked rather well – particularly for the surface of the worktop. I wasn’t expecting that. I’ve always started the other way round, with a 2B or 3B pencil and then adding tone with a 6B.
…Looking at this again a little bit later, I think I probably included to much in the final picture. I found when I look at this now my eyes end up darting this way and that at the different collections of objects – better perhaps would have been just the boxes and bottles as in the preliminary sketches or just the boxes and toaster. I had started the drawing off with the boxes and bottles but drew them a lot smaller than in the preliminary sketches. I think this was because I had found mapping out the objects difficult in those earlier drawings and was worried they would spill over the edges of the picture – but in retrospect I don’t think the latter would have been a problem.
Kris' Art Learning Log 