Cat Food Can

Last night, I was at a large, annual holiday party with a large group of friends. When we were driving home, my hubby mentioned a conversation he had with a friend about drawing. This friend dabbled with drawing for a bit this year, when he borrowed one of his kid's books about drawing. Apparently, his daughter really likes to draw and he wanted to learn a little bit about it. The best part of this conversation, which was relayed to me, was my friend's revelation that drawing is about the shapes. How topical!

For folks who continued to make art beyond grade school or who every took an art class or studied art, this is pretty elementary stuff. For the rest of us, it's pretty amazing. It can open up a new world in how to see the world and how to recreate or represent it in a different form.

Last night, I tried sketching my white, covered, butter dish. I started with the bottom part of the dish. When I got to trying to sketch the cover, I couldn't figure out how to do it, because I was focusing on the object. Switching over to see the shapes or, at this point, the outline of the shape, got me going again. When I was drawing the outline, the direction of the lines felt wrong. When I was done, it wasn't too bad. The angles and proportions were off, but there was a bottom portion.  There was a lid. It vaguely had the shape of the butter dish and even looked slightly 3-dimensional.

I'm going a bit of a bait and switch, since after writing about the butter dish I'm posting my drawings of a tiny cat food can. We have a sick cat in the house and she is being pampered with some additional flavors of food.

These drawings are from this morning. Each time I looked at the can, I saw different things. For the last attempt (upper right corner), I finally focused on getting the height and width proportions closer to the truth. There were so many different things to see that make up "the truth" of the can. My brain is not good at taking it all in. For example, it took me a few attempts to "see" that the pop top was closer to the front edge of the can than the back.