Yesterday I was thinking about warm-up exercises for drawing as, when you think about it, it's not very reasonable to think that you can just sit down and draw effectively from the word go. For a start your muscles need to warm up and your concentration needs to be focused. However, beyond this, no line can be perfect first time - so surely it's better to sketch out a few preparatory shapes before launching into the final version?
With this in mind I arranged a couple of distinctive objects:
Then I took a 2H pencil (so the the lines wouldn't be too dark) and lightly sketched out the dominant shapes. With the freedom of merely sketching I felt happy to push lines this way and that until they looked roughly similar to the contours in front of me. The real benefit though is that this process helped me to actually see and recognise how something like the handle joined the cup but without committing anything to paper:
Then, once I felt happy enough, I just went over the best lines with my pen and erased all of the supporting pencil marks. This left a picture that I'm surprisingly happy with - particularly the cup and its overall shape - even though most of the effort came when I was just sketching. That said the technique isn't a panacea for poor observation; for some reason I made the jug longer than it needed to be from the outset and that's how it stayed. Nevertheless I think that marking a few preparatory outlines is the way to go in the future.
