The British Museum

 17/01/21 - Week 15

This week we were tasked with drawing a piece from the British Museum, I found a piece of pottery that interested me because of the featured figures. This was quite a fun piece to draw and I am glad I picked it.

To start, I think I had a really nice base that had a good amount of accuracy, I struggled a bit to convey the curve of the pot with the skewing of the figures here. I definitely could have been a bit more precise in some areas, just to get the handles and base correct, but overall I think I was off to a good start.

Whilst adding a first pass of shading, I began to realise that the gradient on the pot was going to be a lot harder to create than I thought but I do like the way I used line here to convey the curves of the pot, I think this really helped me shading-wise. A dark object is always a challenge for me.

Another thing I was begging to struggle with was the faces of the figures, I found it difficult to copy the style from the original as I have never drawn a face in this style before. I tried to keep things simple on the face for the moment as I was thinking that it would be formed of very intricate shading rather than more noticeable marks.

The decision to do this really helped me in the next stage as I was able to create a more accurate portrayal of the face by trying to keep it more minimal.

I tried to create the shadow that I could see from the photo though looking back on it, I feel this was the wrong decision as it confuses the lighting quite a lot. The lighting as a whole was quite difficult as having lighting from both sides was causing everything to look very flat which was not what I wanted. 

To me, the finished product does still have that flatness that I was trying to avoid, this could have perhaps been solved by increasing the contrast of the piece, but I felt it was quite difficult to do when I already had a highly contrasted piece. I wanted to figures to stand out as they do in the original but this made it very difficult to add detail without things becoming too dark and muddy.

Overall, this piece was quite challenging but I did enjoy the challenge of it, though the sucess of the final outcome is arguable.