Drawing finished!

Phew! It was all so easy yesterday! I looked at it this morning and realised there was quite a bit to do. Picked up my pencil and the phone rang - morning lost with kids visiting! Later on, I started putting in the details on the right side of the front trainer and saw that my intial sketch was wrong so I did a bit of rubbing out as the laces wouldn't have matched the pattern. Then I noticed there was quite a bit more detail in the soles - crumbs! Who designs these things? Must be a detail freak! (Even worse than me!) I started getting panicky - too left brained now! I settled down after sorting that out and put in a few little shading details and it looked quite good but to be honest, I think those laces look crappy! Like blobby spagetti! But they are too thin in this small drawing to do much about so they have been left as they are. When it looked as if it was just about finished I scanned it so you can see the difference the shadow makes.

This is the finished drawing. After scanning the one above, I thought I could show you how those shadows make the drawing. In almost all the challenges I've done, the shadow has made the difference. So what happens - I make a complete mess of it! I tried to give it a hard shadow and almost lost the shape of the sole. I left the sole lighter with the intention of bringing it out of the darker shadow but it was a disaster. The pencil was too dark right at the edge to rub out so I 'pulled' the shadow out to make it look like diffused light. Never had that happen before. Still, I was relieved it didn't turn out too bad and I find it interesting to look at these two scans - I like the clarity of the first and how the shadow softens the whole drawing in the second.

This drawing took a bit longer and had more details than most of the challenge ones. It didn't occur to me until I posted the first installment that it might all go horribly wrong and that I should have finished it first and blogged about it afterwards! Slightly scary but I have also got over a little fear of mine - that once people see how I do it they will say 'oh is that it?' or 'anyone can do that, it's easy!' I will certainly do it again, I've found it very interesting. It would be nice to go back and see the history behind some of my drawings (I've forgotten now, some are not even dated). Would anyone else like to try this? Let me know if you do, I'd love to see!