Basic Single Object - Teapot

Exercise - p 26 Basic Single Objects from Barrington Barber's HTDE

Here are - a pastel sketch (quick) and a drawing (approx 2 hours) of the teapot.

I like the pastel sketch much more than the drawing although the drawing is a more accurate representation. The pastel seemed to capture the spirit of the teapot more than the drawing. I enjoyed doing both but don't like either of the finished drawings much, especially not the pencil drawing because it looks a bit 'pretty' .

With the drawing, I learned or remembered:

1) that I couldn't draw a kitchen roll with a straight line - it didn't look like paper. It must seem obvious to other people that you need to draw a soft wavyish line for this, but it took me a while to figure it out.

2) shadows - I could draw the shape of the shadows, but then didn't know which way to make the lines go in the shading. First of all I drew them in the direction the shadow fell, but they didn't look right. Eventually I realised that I had to just accentuate whatever lines were in the drawing anyway, so the wooden floor had to have the grains running in the same direction that they did run, just made darker. Once again, this seems so obvious now, but I struggled with this for quite a while. I see that you can still see some of the wrong lines. Never mind.

3) that I need softer pencils - I've got plenty but I was being lazy, just using my old papermate non-stop because it's got a nice fine point and a rubber on the other end.

Another thing I thought afterwards was that the teapot looked better on the table downstairs than either on a desk upstairs where the pastel sketch was done or on the floor upstairs where I eventually drew it.