Composition and Space - Exaggerated formats and umbrellas...

Now I'm up to chapter 7 in Howard Smagulas "Creative Drawing" textbook and the theme is Composition and space. He gives a nice introduction about how artists define the space in personal ways into a unified "composition". This weeks project was all about choosing a format - the proportional relationship of the paper's length to its height. He goes on to say that the format you choose will be related to the subject matter you are drawing - eg: tall buildings go well in a vertical format, panoramas more suited to rectangular format etc.... Pretty obvious stuff I suppose...

This weeks project was to plan and create a drawing on an elongated format that takes into consideration the special qualities of the subject. A broom was suggested as a good subject, but as it was raining outside and I didn't want to trek out to the garage to fetch it, I chose my umbrella - a perfect subject for a rainy day !

So, as you can see in the second photo, although the paper was vertical, I still didn't judge the proportion correctly and  the whole umbrella didn't fit on that sized paper - because the umbrella was so elongated, it needed a more exaggerated format to capture the length than a standard sketchbook size paper. So I continued the drawing on another page and stuck them together to show the paper size that was needed to correctly capture this tall, elongated form of the umbrella. By doing this I think the exaggerated quality of the elongation was achieved, so I'm happy with the result...