The other day I talked about setting myself a challenge when drawing a spoon - to produce six drawings in a row with each one strictly limited to ten minutes only. I found this a refreshing experience as I couldn't afford to spend long worrying about specific lines or fussing over a tiny detail; the clock was ticking!
So today I figured that I'd try the same approach but this time with a hard-boiled egg - although one which I'd broken a strip from to add interest. Unfortunately I don't have a photograph of the egg as my son came along and ate it (after I'd completed the exercise fortunately)! Instead what I can show you are the results of this study:
To be honest I'm much less pleased with the results here. I found it very difficult indeed to achieve even halfway realistic shading in the time allotted and while the third egg is better than the first it's no great shakes. Certainly with this latter picture I was starting to get a feel for the cracked fragments in the shell, and the different ways in which they reflected the light but even, and even so. In fact I felt so disillusioned at this point that I switched to an ink pen so see if that would help but it didn't - these sketches just look like Medieval maps of the ancient world and that's no compliment. Still it's better to try and fail rather than not try at all...