Continuing with Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner I've now moved onto drawing asymmetrical objects. The reason for this is that most subjects can't be easily broken down into regular shapes, although it's surprising how many can be, and so I need to expand my technique for dealing with irregular forms.
It seems that the core technique here is to capture an overall shape and to use loose directional lines to zero in on how the outlines of the object twist and turn. So I thought that I'd look for something which was both interesting and easily to hand and this packet of crisps seemed to fit the bill:
In practice I sketched the perimeter of the packet paying attention to the direction in which contours were heading. Then I took a moment to fill in some of the internal contours and to mesh them together with the outer lines; this went a long way towards making the picture feel more real. After that I shaded in some of the more shadowed areas and that left me with this:
For a pencil drawing I think that this captures a decent sense of the object and the way in which it fills its space. There's certainly something to be said for the 'directional line' technique anyway if this is the kind of result which it can lead to.