Another day, another drawing (I wish).

The purpose of this exercise is too teach me to learn to look for shapes, starting with the large ones. I was supposed to choose a jar or bottle made of tinted glass. Instead I chose a clear wine bottle filled with a 2014 rosé that Marie and I picked up when we visited Napa Valley last year.

I thought a red would be too opaque and a white might be too translucent. In retrospect, it would have been better to do a white because there ended up being a dearth of stuff to draw towards the bottom and I was left with drawing mostly the reflection of the bay windows off the bottle.

I was also attracted to the fact that the label of this wine is printed directly on the bottle, thus allowing me to see reflections over the printing. This helped me a lot in figuring out the position of the lettering and such on the labels, but overall, I would have liked more shapes to draw instead of spending so much time sketching the ornate metal wrapper and the castle on the label, though doing that did remind me of our visit to the Castello di Amorosa.

I used the need for bright daytime light to penetrate the wine as an excuse to procrastinate for days on this exercise. But the last three days have been unbelievably sunny for this part of the city so I finally opened the windows and started drawing.

No sooner than I had drawn the basic bottle shape and some reflections than the fog started to roll in. I took a photo of the image, went on a run with Marie before the sun set, ate dinner, and continued later that night using the iPad’s Slide Over feature mentioned earlier to have the photo reference next to my drawing in Procreate.

That was fortuitous as I could really spend a long time getting lost in the shapes as well as fix the proportions on the bottle’s neck which I got wrong the first few times I drew it. It all started out pretty pathetic, but by just concentrating on drawing any shapes, things began to resemble a wine bottle somewhat.

In the middle of drawing, I discovered that it is much better to sketch with the pencil size turned all the way down—the thinner, lighter lines allowed my strokes to be less tentative and still remain responsive to what I was seeing. I was surprised to find out while drawing that the top of the cap clearly screws off and getting the lettering right was one of the harder parts, not easier.

It was about an hour after I finished that I remembered to sign and date it using a calligraphic pen for my name and a technical one for the date.


Next up: Mechanical Objects.