Today Tony told us we were going to draw the most difficult object – and also do some visualising. We also covered some perspective theory.

We worked in pencil which he said could be ‘brittle and unforgiving’ – but on the other hand preserves more of the content of the mark making than charcoal for example. We were told to rub out using a paper towel – as more graphite gets transferred on to it it makes more interesting rubbings out.

Drawing a piece paper
The difficult object was a piece of paper placed on the floor. I’ve heard other teachers at City Lit talk about time spent at art school drawing a piece of paper.

We first drew the paper roughly – mine seemed okay – however of course it wasn’t at all.

We were asked to measure it in several ways – horizontally – looking at the angles – and vertically – looking at the triangles.

When I measured horizontally I found that there were the lengths of the sides the top and bottom were hugely out. Addressing this meant measuring all the horizontal and vertical angles again – took from 10am to lunch time.

We were also shown one and two point perspectives – how we could use lines of perspective to check on the angles.

The another piece of narrower paper was placed on the left, one on the right, then several more. I found this extremely difficult and didn’t manage to draw them all, took nearly the rest of the afternoon.

You can see from the drawing below how problematic I found it.

Finally we took some time to look at everyone’s picture and tried to visualise what we could see. Tony said mine looked a bit like a scrap yard. We were allowed to add to what was there to enhance the visualisation – I put in a wheel shape – probably went against using what was there – it was completely extraneous. However it felt okay in the end.  We were allowed to use shading and an eraser to enhance what we’d done.

I didn’t really enjoy the day – have practised a couple of times during the week – not sure I’m confident about these aspects.