Drawing 2: Composition

One of the things that happens in a creative endeavour is change and this project is no exception. After finishing the first drawing I looked at the remaining compositions and some of them no longer measured up. I actually had two of them drawn on trace paper and scrapped em, which meant I needed to return to my original photograph and look for material that matched what I'm doing. You'll see the updates in the progress bar above. In the end, 5 of the original compositions were retired, replaced by 2 new ones that follow the rules and 3 that don't. I'll share the ones that break the rules in a later post. Suffice to say they are worth straying off the path for or at least that's the way it looks at the moment. This triaging has produced more rejects than keepers by the way - I've got 23 compositions in the project folder.... It's a good thing I'm not a baseball player.

Here's the next subject I'll be drawing:

This grabbed my attention when I had the feeling it was looking back at me - sort of peeking out between the foreground elements with a bit of an eyebrow arching over the top.

On another level, the rotation of the photo reversed the lighting, which adds a twist to the piece that moves it just out of the familiar zone enough that it begs another look. We're used to seeing the world lit from above and reversing that gives the eye a bit of a nudge. There's a fine line here though, as too much of it - too harsh a reversal - can be jarring to the point we dismiss what we see as improbable and look away in disbelief. In this composition the lighting is soft enough to suggest there's something not quite right, but what that might be is uncertain. This is a visual hook that gets the attention of the viewer and pulls them in to investigate. Note as well the range of tone from black shadow all the way through white edge highlights. Having this variation in a composition allows for the development of depth and interest as light areas move forward and dark recede. I look for compositions that contain these types contrasts inside a set of layers - recall that I don't employ perspective in these drawings, so the viewer must be convinced of depth using other techniques, like this one.

There are some very strong forms at work in this piece that also recommended it for the project. This work differs sharply from the last one in terms of the angles of the elements. Here almost everything is heading off in a different direction, suggesting we're looking at a nexus of objects coming together, but yet there's no single physical point of contact - the connection is fragmented and shared by three points. These become elements of interest in the picture that carry on a visual conversation between themselves. As we look in on them we see there is a relationship of motion here that could happen at any moment. This charges the composition with energy as the viewer recognizes this is a train and these are parts of its engineering that move in rotation around one another. In the first drawing there was the potential for motion as well, but there was also a clear directional grain in the piece and a counterpoint element that called attention to that rule. In this work the opposite is happening and when we find something that lines up it's almost like we solved a puzzle or caught a glimpse of these whirling parts at just the right the moment, which is sort of cool.

Here's the layout drawing for the above composition. I didn't alter anything on this between the photo and the paper - the picture just works; it's balanced right out of the gate. 

Next time I'll talk a bit about the tools I use in the early stages of developing one of these drawings.