Spherical Objects

Alphonso Dunn does beautiful pen and ink drawings. I've checked out his book from the library and really should pick up a copy. Yesterday on Facebook, a post popped up from him about a new video on YouTube. It was very topical, since it was about drawing a sphere in pen and ink.  It got me thinking about how to translate this to paint strokes.

Yesterday, I went to the grocery store and found a strange looking citrus, called a sumo mandarin. I bought one to paint. Given Alphonso's video, I thought about it's shape and started a quick drawing in my kitchen, which I didn't finish.

After that I went downstairs to paint.

The top part which sticks up didn't turn out the way I wanted. It was coming along at the mid-point of the painting. I thought about why and will give it another go. It's almost like this was my warm up to better understand the shape of this thing.

#309 - Almost One Stroke Sumo Mandarin - 6" x 6" - paper

This morning, I had a little extra time in the morning and I was thinking about my friend, the sumo mandarin. I started another quick drawing. When I got to the right side, I tried to turn off my thinking brain and just go with the flowy part, trying to capture the shape directions with mostly straight hatch marks. By the say, I do realize that I make up my own form of English and word usage when I write about this stuff, so don't ask me to define what "shape directions" really means, but it's the description that popped into my head. When I stopped, the idea of a vanishing point seemed to apply. To "build" a round shape, it seems like you need to angle the hatch marks towards an axis (like Alphonso mentioned). At the outer edges, the angle is more extreme and at the inner part, it's less extreme. It seems like this could also apply to the angle of paint strokes.  None of this is absolute, since if all hatch marks or paint strokes were mostly up and down (or side to side), the result would look pretty boring. Still, it's something to contemplate. 

Does any of this make any sense at all? At least I can say, that I am getting a lot of value from the $2.39 piece of fruit I purchased yesterday.