margaret-cooter: Drawing Tuesday

Tthe Timekeeping section turned out not to be such a good choice because of the lack of seats or benches (the Science Museum doesn't offer sketching stools, which is perhaps understandable in light of the many school groups that use the museum).

I found a comfortable place on the floor, with a view to drawing the clock from Dover Castle (c.1200) -

but ended up standing the whole time as I had to go nearer to be able to see it and to work out which cog was connected to which lever. It felt very complicated, for such a "primitive" mechanism - in fact, not primitive at all. It's my drawing that is the primitive thing -

Nor can you actually see it, because it's a mass of sketchy pencil lines, nothing definite.

So, while preparing this post, I took some tracing paper and a pen and, not without gnashing of teeth, came up with this -

Only a week after spending two hours looking at that clock, I had completely lost all sense of the interconnections of the mechanism, even with reference to the photograph. While doing the tracing, I reminded myself this is not a technical drawing, and it's a first attempt, done without any technical knowledge.

What I carry forward from the various frustrations arising from the drawing and the tracing is: (1) consider using different viewpoints for small details, to understand interconnections; (2) give up the pale pencil marks; (3) be bold and be prepared to start again. It also made me think about the different qualities that pencil and pen bring to a drawing.

Another view, end on -

This has words added (rather than detail drawings) - at the top, "foliot mechanism goes here"; elsewhere, "decorative details", "more cogs", "more wheels", "how many cogs on this wheel" - and "losing the will to live - perspective gone wrong - not enough space". The use of words was spurred by this module of the extended drawing course.