Womack Report

July 14, 2008

Back porch drawing

Filed under: Art,School — Tags: , , , — Phillip Womack @ 9:41 pm

I’m still excited about the drawing class I started this morning, so I took my little sketch pad and a pencil out on the back porch to do a little bit of practicing.

I scanned the results in to my computer with Grandpa’s printer/scanner/copier thingy. It doesn’t seem to be a wildly great scanner, but I really don’t need much for pencil sketches. Really, given that I’ve been at this for one day, I can only attribute quality problems to the artist, not to the equipment.

First:

Birdhouse

Grandpa’s bird house. It’s on a very tall metal pole right at the edge of his yard, right before the yard ends and the ocean starts. I’m not particularly happy with this drawing, but I’m not ashamed of it. I think it looks very amateurish, but, hey, I’m an amateur. The second thing I need to keep in mind before I indulge in self criticism is that the thing was very far away. From where I was sitting and sketching, the birdhouse was tiny; the sketch, on a 6″ by 9″ pad, actually appeared larger than the real thing. So, not a great work, but it’s something. The lesson here, I think, is that it’s easier to draw things which are close to you than things which are far away. Pretty obvious lesson, I suppose, but you start somewhere. The thing I like least about it is the angles of the roof and the two upper shelves. They aren’t all parallel to each other, but they don’t look quite right nonetheless. I know they’re wrong, but I can’t define how they’re wrong clearly enough to fix them. So be it.

Second, a drawing that turned out much better:

Tulip Can

This is a little galvanized pitcher that sits on Grandpa’s back porch with tulip bulbs growing out of it. I was able to get close to it as I was drawing it, which helped a lot on the details. I can still see flaws in it, but overall I’m pretty happy with this one. It looks like what it is. The handle on the can is the biggest flaw, I think; it should be curving further out, and point where the two edges cross in your field of vision is a bit strange. The back-most leaf in the middle is also not right, but I don’t think it stands out. The two big bunches of leaves should have had more space between them, but I got the perspective slightly off, and they crowded together. I think I adapted to that reasonably well, though.

Edit: The bulbs are actually Amaryllis plants, not tulips. This information comes from my mother, who would know. I had wondered whether they were actually tulips, but I couldn’t remember and so I said the wrong thing.

Both drawings show a distinct tendency to squash things horizontally and stretch them vertically. I need to watch out for that in the future.

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