Project One Sketches

Our first project, "What is Good Design?" has led me to do a number of things:

1) It has forced me to do quick, rough, unrefined work, which usually drives me crazy but has turned out to be a good thing.

2) It has helped me to get out of my funk and draw things every day.

3) It has made me sick of the lamp my parents got me for my dorm room.

Ha ha, but seriously.  After literally drawing this thing fifty times I never want to see it again!  But doing this has helped me get to know eery facet of its form.  I looked back at the first drawings I did of it and realized that the newer ones are much better and more accurate to its form.  Here are five drawings from throughout this project that I think are successful:

 Here's one of the earlier drawings I did.  Of all the contours I made,  this one went over best in critique and I agree that it conveys the most information about the lamp.  Not only did I cover the outlines but the lines formed by the different shapes within the lamp, especially on the handle, which is a really unique part of the lamp that has a lot of unexpected detail.

These two cross contour drawings communicate different things about my lamp.  (Yes it's a lamp.  Check out the later drawings where it's unfolded.)  The first focuses more on planes.  Although this wasn't really what a cross contour is supposed to be like, I thought it showed the object's character.  The second contour shows the 3-D form overall, all the curves--and it's a very sleek, curved object, which contributes to its appeal.

These negative space drawings are best, I think, together, and wouldn't be as effective on their own, because the shapes play off of each other, so I'm counting them as one image.  While they don't include details of the lamp, they show the fun angles the lamp makes when you open it.

This is one of my overall favorites...once again the two individual sketches play off of each other to create very interesting negative space, but adding the differing values makes it more dynamic than a lot of the other drawings.  Plus I just picked better, more interesting angles to draw the lamp from.

It'll be fun to try to arnage my sketches for the final version of the project...and it'll be a relief to stop drawing it and accidentally smearing graphite on the poor thing!  Then I can appreciate my lamp as just being a lamp again.

On a somewhat related note, graphite sticks are more fun than I thought they'd be, but I still like vine charcoal better.  I need to find an excuse to use it.