The chair is yellow

What I didn't tell you is that the little chair is yellow. And it seems a shame to leave out of the drawing that very important part of the visual experience of my objects. This is what it looked like when I was drawing the sketches in the last blog entry...

Ever since then I've been mulling over how best to convey the yellowness of it, at the same time as practising seeing the blocks of light and shade, and came up with the idea of blocking it out in yellow collage. I don't really know where the limits of 'drawing' come, and whether using collage is allowed. I even wondered whether using colour at all is supposed to be included in this section, but I guess I can do what seems right to me.

I also wondered if there was a better background for this piece, as the floorboards are rather boring, a little confusing and don't add the texture contrast I think would work best. So for the next sketch I tried this textured rug.

The light is also in a different position - coming from behind the chair rather than from the side. I thought this gave a clearer pattern of light/shadow.

The background paper is again the brown wrapping paper I used before, really because it is a bit rough (as opposed to the yellow card) and takes graphite pencil, but also because I thought it would be able to take the rather watery glue I was using.





Once I had stuck on the brighter yellow parts, added a couple of highlights with white paper, and drawn in the rest of the chair with graphite pencil, I saw that I would need to use something sharper for the more detailed parts of the other objects, so I switched to pencil.

Sketch of yellow chair - collage, graphite pencil and 2B pencil

What I learned from doing this one: The collage on brown paper shows the shape of the chair while showing where the light is. It overwhelms the other objects, though, and the crumples in the brown paper make shadows which confuse the picture. The other objects need to be in a stronger material - I think ink would give an intense enough line for that. Or perhaps a darker brown collage for the objects on the chair, and ink for the troll foot. I think the more textured floor/ background is good, but needs to be more of a contrast with the foot, and this would be true if the troll foot was in ink.

So I used this combination: collage in yellow and brown, graphite pencil, and ink, on ironed brown paper!