Exercise: Viewpoint

For this exercise I was asked to make a collection of objects around a theme. I chose ‘summer’ since I was in Italy on holiday.

Using objects from the gorgeous flat we rented, I used a digital camera to move around the set of objects from all angles and distances to try to get interesting combinations of shapes and textures. I came up with the below using a beach towel, sandals, sunglasses, starfish and a shell:

I was then asked to experiment in the same way with drawings but in a different format that is different from the viewfinder of the camera so I tried different rectangles, squares etc. and used my favourite photos from above to do this in Lightroom first since some of the objects I couldn’t take home with me! I even moved the photos around diagonally, playing with the rotation and zoom and crop options to get the below:

I then tried out further shapes and replicating these viewpoints in the following drawings:

Zooming in to have some parts of each of the objects worked well and I quite liked the perspective that was created with the different sizes and layers. I also liked the birdseye-style view which I felt made a simpler drawing and which I liked more from an aesthetic sense. The starfish’s long legs were definitely eye catching and really gave an idea of the seaside.

Of these three, the bottom right with the focus on the sunglasses and how they moved into the background gave a really nice perspective. However the objects behind them were a little too overlapping and gave the sense of a messy set up or being too overcrowded. The other two worked ok to a certain extent but I wasn’t really getting much of nice balance of objects.

The left and right drawings I really liked. One fully birdseye and the other from the top but off at an angle. I felt like there was enough of the objects to clearly understand the theme but scattered enough to convey the idea of a lazy day lying on the beach which was what I was going for. The long vertical and thin rectangular viewfinder was also nice as it mimics the idea of a beach towel.

I also tried some odder shapes of viewfinders which gave a nice effect, especially the triangle which comes off more as a suggestion and could be placed down at the corner of a page with other content or text for example, but I didn’t find it convincing on its own. The paralellogram was quite nice as also gives a kind of movement to the drawing. Though I ended up going back to the vertical narrow ‘beach-towel’ esque birdseye view drawing as the final choice of drawing to re-do at a larger scale. I felt that the shapes came together nicely without being too crowded or overlapping and the folds of the towel and the arrangement of the objects gave a nice ‘randomness’ that I feel was most believable as a ‘natural’ still life you really could find at the beach on the edge of someone’s towel, rather than the more contrived positioning of most of the other drawings and photos. I also think that using the rectangle, which most of us are used to, meant that we could concentrate on the drawing and not be distracted by an odd shape of frame.

When I was arranging the objects and taking photos I also definitely started moving the objects around again to try to get the most interesting shapes or a nice perspective with things more in the front or back. I also took out an object I had originally wanted to bring in, a little boat key ring but I felt that it was an object that made the drawing be too complicated so I took it out straight away.

Final reflections:

This was a nice exercise as I felt that helped me build more skill in using perspective and positioning and it helped think quite literally outside the normal box of viewpoints, put even more to the test by having to scale up the final visual below. (All of the above were done on A4 paper. I redid the chosen one at A3 as per the below.) This was also a good way to think about placing objects and how to tie them together which I think I struggled with in previous exercises and perhaps came up with combinations that weren’t quite working as a group.