Drawing class, week 2

At the start of the class, the still life (paraphernalia of an art room) was surrounded by our work from the previous week - and sure enough, I didn't recognise my own drawing.

This week's theme was space - flat space and deep space, with a bit of confusion about shallow space and the role of objects in among the planes. I'm sure I learnt something, and it will all become clear before long.

First we were to draw flat space on one side of our paper, and deep space on the other. Plunge in...

 That looked more like deep space to me, so I tried to find something that was "flatter" -

A feeble attempt but I did enjoy the pattern of the wheels on the folded-up screen. And was told that the first one was flat space after all. But the second wasn't deep space.

My simplistic concept is that flat space is about parallel planes, and deep space is about converging planes, ie angles. So I used some empty space to get closer to "deep space" from where my easel was - that's at the bottom -

At the top is yet another kind of space, "ambiguous space" - where it's hard to figure out what the objects might be. It was suggested to add the outlines of the dark areas (such as shadows) as well as shapes of objects. And to zoom in.

Ambiguous space might be used as another way of looking at objects that are all too familiar. The artist is deliberately being "confusing" so that the viewer can see first the drawing and then realise what the objects are.

Fortunately those exercises were scrubbed out (the joy of charcoal) and became background "interest" in a longer drawing of whichever type of space we chose, with the emphasis on working by eye rather than measuring. I looked and drew and scrubbed and looked and drew and ... finally Teacher came along and did some measuring with the handle of a paintbrush, which he handed to me, having connected points with lines to show where the measuring took place -

I definitely need to do some of this checking-with-measuring. Again it goes back to "draw what's there, not what you already know about the object" - and this became clearer when, after a brief talk about perspective, we added perspective lines to the drawing - yet another little trick that, eventually, helps you to see 3D in 2D shapes -

Seeing the drawing a day later, I have a strong desire to lower the top corner of the box ... and who knows where that might lead ...

No class next week, it's May Day bank holiday.