Drawings of Photos of Ceramics

Last time, I mentioned that I was going to take a look at the possibility of drawing my ceramic figures, or drawing from my photos of the ceramic figures. Well, it turned out that the perfect starting point for this exploration was actually... painting. You see, it stemmed more out of a hit-two-birds-with-one-stone mentality than the actual desire to paint my ceramic figures. In my painting class, our next project was supposed to be about the concepts of space, using two canvases to bring together 2-D and 3-D space.

I'd mentioned to Scott, in that last so-serious meeting, about how I found it a little challenging that there is a completely different approach to life-sculpting than to life-drawing. Instead of examining and acknowledging areas of light and shadow, and the illusion of space and depth, the clay restricts you to form and volume. So this is where ideas of drawing, or painting, the ceramic pieces came into play.

So I set up my studio again, and got to work.

I was struggling with the scale of the work, and the brushstrokes (and my growing dislike of paint), but it made for a good starting point. With the drawings, I knew I had to work in much smaller scale, and I wanted to explore the potential mark-making of drawing media.

These two I drew directly from my still life setup using oil pastel. I started too large, the first being about 11 inches and the second about 10 inches, which is why they went unfinished. 

So I went in for the smaller scale, again from the still life setup (pictured). Both these drawings are also oil pastel. The first is about 7"x5", and the second is about 4"x5".

I found I wasn't quite achieving what I wanted to. The figures didn't stand out to me like ceramic figures. They could easily have been drawn from a real model (except for the missing limbs). So the next step was to draw from the photographs.

With these, I maintained the small scale (using my 8.5"x5.5" sketchbook) and I worked quickly. I think these were the key to keeping a similar temporal quality that the ceramics had. 

What do you think?

Also, how meta am I? Technically these are photos of drawings of photos of ceramics.... yeesh!