At Home Exercise 2 composition - an interior

The task was to pick a view in the house and try out several slightly different views, using mainly tone.

I picked the complex view of the entrance hall with pillars and interesting wooden floor.

The view I started with was from the stairs, looking down, so that the walls made a W shape in the picture.

This is the first sketch. There was light coming from the window in the door to the right, and from behind the pillar. I had to do a lot of rubbing out and ended up with the light areas being in all the wrong places.

I didn't quite believe that the walls leaned out as much as they did and I felt the need to draw in the corner although in real life it was only visible by the change in tone from one wall to the other.

Looking at this again it's amazing how I disregarded the much deeper tone of the floor. I didn't concentrate so much on the tone for this one and it shows in the whole thing looking a bit bare and flat. There's something 1950s about it too, which isn't really how it feels to be there. What do I mean? Something about it being constructed rather than felt. No atmosphere. (Nothing against 1950s styles just the way I think of this in my head).

This one's from below, me practically lying on the floor. A bit of a difficult position to draw from. It ended up being mostly about the objects rather than the architecture. I don't know if that's wrong, exactly, but it seemed to me that it would be more useful from the point of view of learning to draw, for me to do one with more angles and light variations to it.

It is a nice composition though, with the focus on the objects but lots of interest elsewhere too, and the unusual perspective makes it more interesting.

This is my next attempt to draw the view from the stairs. I took a slightly different angle on it to reduce the detail behind the pillar, and I tried with a landscape piece of paper to see the effect. I agree that its more intimate this way, which is suitable for the feeling of this hall, without losing the interesting shapes. I got the variety of tone a bit better in this one, but there's much more tone detail needed on the pillar etc. And I had to rub out some smudges on the window in the door on the right, which was not very effective.

Finally, I tried a more straight-on view, which meant that I couldn't get as much distance from it, and therefore ended up with a smaller area in the picture again.



Of these four sketches, I picked the first one to repeat for the tonal study, but using the paper in landscape to emphasise the W and focus a bit more on the lovely dark wood floor.