Shoe Drawings

Still Life Drawing

At the beginning of my foundation course, we all took part in various workshops, each workshop lasted for two days. During this class we were told to bring in shoes to draw.

Day 1

On the first day, we were only able to create tonal drawings. To get us warmed up, we spent about two hours, creating quick drawings of shoes. First, we picked one shoe and spent 2 minutes sketching the shoe, only using a continuous line, then we would rotate the shoe and repeat the same process.

We repeated that process eight times. At the beginning, I was...well terrible. I was to concerned about getting the proportions right that I wasn't able to drawing all the shoe. I began to relax and I can see as time went on, my drawings improved. I would highly recommend doing this exercise. Not only does it help you loosen up and create quick detail sketches, it teaches you to look more and from my experience, the more you look the better your work will look.

Then we created a few more drawings, but using our opposite hand, then we did two more drawings but with our eyes closed. I don't actually have any photos of my work from them exercises but take from me, they looked nothing like shoes. However, that exercise helped me to loosen up. So if you are like me and everything must be perfect, it would be brilliant for you. If you try to make everything perfect, you'll never stop trying.

Next, we picked another shoe and we repeated the same exercise from the beginning. Once we had done the first eight sketches, we then had to do the same process but in 1 minute 30 seconds for four sketches and then the same but in 1 minute for four sketches.

For the rest of the day, we picked one shoe and we had to create a still life drawing of that shoe. We had about 4 hours to create this drawing, I spent about the first 2 hours drawing the outline of the shoes and getting the proportions correct. It was tiring. I used a range of pencils, from grade 4H to 6B. Sadly time was not on my side and I could not finish the drawing but I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

Day 2

On the second day, we were able to use coloured media and again, we were creating a still life study of the shoes. However, I felt that this life study was much more difficult compared to the first day. We could use whatever medium we wanted to. I chose to use acrylic paints as it was easier to create the colours closest to the shoes. I spent about 2 hours measuring out the the drawing and getting the proportions right and then spent the rest of the day trying to complete as much of the painting as possible.