Piddling about with drawing (1)

In the wake of my tutorial in the Extended Drawing course, and over the break, I've been trying to spend about 10 hours a week actually "doing drawing" - sitting down at my table (the one with the cosy radiator underneath) and having the radio on and just doing something. 

The one I'm happiest with is this -

A3 size, it's an amalgam of sketchbook work from the Museum of London and the Kircaldy Testing Museum. First I traced the bale-lifting tools onto a sheet of detail paper, through which I could see the original, with the idea of filling in the background with ink. Well the ink spread where it shouldn't have, so I gave that up and used a light box (it had been lurking on a shelf for quite some time, becoming invisible) to trace them onto cartridge.

This involved choosing just some of the tools in each column - and then the composition looked a bit sparse. Riffling through the book turned up some interesting shapes found at the Kircaldy Testing Museum -

and once those were added, the page looked like this -

I used white wax crayon on the metal shapes, inking over them to knock them back a bit and let the bale-hooks come into the foreground -

It's a bit of a jumble, and there are compositional lessons to be learned from that. Even though it doesn't hang together conceptually for me, I feel I've made something "new" and taken the sketchbook work further, at last.