Wednesday, January 13, 2010

A Better Cup

Well, the last drawing of my coffee cup was pretty poor. But, you can't ignore it when something goes wrong. If it's wrong, determine what you did wrong and correct for it the next time.

So, time to tackle the drawing of the cup again. This time the results turned out much better. Why? Because I first drew the basic structure in pencil.

When drawing ovals, it's always easier to draw the full oval and then erase the portions that are covered. For example, the rim of the cup, the inner circle of the saucer and the outer circle of the saucer were drawn as overlapping ovals. Once the proportions were correct, then the area of the ovals that was hidden by the cup was erased.

Once I had the basic outline drawing done and defined the shadow areas in pencil, I just started shading. An important note is that, like painting, I cross-hatch areas of shadows rather than actually drawing distinct lines. This leads to a more even flow on the shadows.

Overall, this cup turned out pretty well. However, one drawing of a cup does not mean that I can draw cups well. Time to do it again and change the angle.

2 comments:

  1. How interesting- I love to draw but am mostly self taught.It's fun to learn real techniques :)
    via etsy forums,
    andrea

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  2. Thanks for the comment. I'm pretty much self-taught. Although I took one drawing class, most of what I know/can do is a matter of many, many, many hours of work.

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