Saturday, November 10, 2007

Illustration Friday - Scale


The prompt this week is "scale". The word "scale" has many meanings, and I finally settled on illustrating the definition "a proportion between two sets of dimensions (as between those of a drawing and its original)." I drew a picture of a vase from life and then scanned the drawing. I printed scaled versions of the drawing, scaling up and down at 25% intervals. I then used a light box to transfer all 5 sizes of the drawing to the final illustration. I added a little shading for interest and deliberately left the scaling and scaffolding lines visible. B and 3B pencil on Strathmore 400 Series Drawing medium paper (9" x 12").

This turned into an experimental drawing exercise, which I really enjoyed. The perspective in the drawing doesn't make sense. For example, the ellipses should not all be the same shape, and the background vases should be less defined than the foreground vases. But this drawing is not intended to be realistic--I did what I found to be pleasing from a design perspective. Ignoring the rules of realistic drawing can be enjoyable and freeing.

6 comments:

Nicole Florian said...

Very nice drawing! This remembers me my art school very, very long time ago

Willie Baronet said...

Well done!

studio lolo said...

Very nice drawing Laurel! Smart idea.

RyanLoghry said...

I spend a lot of my time shading in a sketchbook, and I'm curious, how long did the final drawing take you? Nice work.

Laurel Neustadter said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Laurel Neustadter said...

Ryan: I used a tortillion to blend, so the shading didn't take very long. It took me about 30 minutes to draw a contour of one vase from life (and get it right). Once I had that drawing, I scanned it into the computer and printed it at different scales. I used a light box to combine all the different sized vases, and then I added shading. The final drawing took around an hour.