Logically Illogical

Last week we went to the Arboretum in Arcadia, CA to draw plants.  It wasn’t so much learning how to draw plants, but rather learning to ignore all the details of the plants and focus on the bigger shapes.  This is a very useful technique, but a habit that is very difficult to break away from.  

When you observe an object, you can see all the details on the object, but if you draw the object and recreate every single detail of the object on your piece of paper, the object will become hard to read.  It’s now muddled up in all the details and your reader’s eyes don’t know where to look.  A technique we learned is to step back and figure out what general, simple shape can be used to represent this object.  A box?  A cylinder?  A sphere?  A cone?  Then draw out this shape to get the proportions right.  If you go straight into all the details on a leaf, or a flower, you’re gonna mess up on the proportions because you’re not looking at the bigger picture.

Once the shape is chosen, draw out the silhouette of the object.  This allows you to see where the boundaries are.  After that, you can begin to add details.

Detailing in itself is a thinking process.  You have to look at the object and decide which part of it you want your reader to focus on.  Is it the pattern on the leaf?  Or the pattern on the flower?  We were told to draw a very thin circle around our focal point, and only to detail anything within this circle.  Anything outside should remain a silhouette, with maybe a little bit of texture, but nothing more.  

Being so used to detailing stuff, this is a difficult thing for me to do.  As you can see in some of the pictures, I ended up detailing a lot of the stuff outside the focal point.  But mistake is part of the learning, and the more mistake I make, the faster I’ll learn. 

The homework for this week is to study plants, and redesign an object using the features of a plant.  I decided to redesign a teapot, because I drink tea frequently.  A lot of people in the class did creatures/monsters, but I’m not very confident with my creature designs.  Products always have a special place in my heart anyway.