When we work from a still life, I always remind the class that there’s a lot of stuff there and you can choose to draw the whole pile or you can zoom in and draw a select, small passage. In this case, a student just went for the tilted dark bottle and a bit of adjacent drapery. How on earth do you make an interesting drawing out of such a clunky object? Ah, but it’s not about the object it’s about how you draw it. We had been talking about the problem of the contour, the topic in the last post on Leonardo and sfumato. It’s not a problem, really, it’s just that you can set yourself the goal of drawing that old bottle without outlining it in a consistent line. You can practice interrupting the line. That simple. At first, you may think this is awkward or arbitrary, but then you discover that since light 
comes from above, the upper part of the bottle will be lighter and if you lighten the contour there or leave the line out altogether, the bottle will look quite lively. Notice also, that part of the bottle is defined by the shadow in the drapery behind it, i.e something that is not-bottle and is not a contour of anything.
Once the bottle and its attendant drapery swatch were drawn, Gaby faced all that white “negative” space. What the still life set-up offered wasn’t all that dynamic, so she invented. Are you allowed to do that? Oh, yessss! She invented bricks, curved ones. The rectilinearity of the brickwork anchors the tilted bottle in a credible universe. The fact that the bricks are curved adds texture and an echo of the roundness of the bottle.
The result is a painterly drawing. We’ve used the word “painterly” before in these posts (12.22.10 and 3.12.11), but it will get more coverage, soon, and this time in connection with drawing.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 