Part 2 Project 6 Exercise 2 Composition - an interior

For these interior sketches, I decided to take the corner of my kitchen near the sink. At the time of drawing, it had a collection of water bottles, a jug, wooden bowl of bananas and an assortment of other vertically orientated containers.

I started out with a view taken from sitting on a cushion on the floor. I used a landscape-orientated format with the help of a viewfinder to orientate my lines and the boundaries of my chosen view. I found the linear perspective of the cupboard quite hard to get correct at this angle. What I did not like was that the large majority of the sketch was taken up with the lines of the cupboards and very little of the objects on the counter.

View from the floor.

From the same viewpoint, I shifted my viewfinder so that the sketch focused on the objects themselves. The problem with this approach was that in the end the sketch resembled a still life and not really an interior study.

Zoom in of view from the floor.

As a result of this development, for my third drawing, I placed my cushion on the stovetop and perched up there so that I was looking along the top of the draining board and double-sink, towards the arrangement of containers. This view allowed me to see more within my viewfinder, meaning that it became more of an interior scene, than a still life study. Once again, the perspective was rather interesting to get right, but allowed for a sense of deep space because of the objects which were up close versus those that were higher up the picture plane and resultantly seen as further away. I used a portrait format to enable me to get the impression of the length of the sink and counter.

I fancied climbing even higher and sitting on top of the fridge, but as I was alone at home, I did not think it too wise. Instead, I stood on a chair in front of the fridge. I liked the angle of the perspective, and the landscape format worked fairly well in this case. However, I felt that it would be hard to draw standing on a chair for any length of time, with an A2 or A1 size piece of paper.

View drawn while standing on a chair.