As I've been working from contour drawings to a slightly more relaxed form of sketching Claire Watson Garcia has encouraged me (and many others I guess) to avoid being too precise and to welcome a freer form of picture. So I've been trying to work with directional lines and to see shapes rather than feel a need to define an object in terms of such shapes. In pursuit of this today I picked on an ordinary electrical plug as my subject since it seemed to offer some clear contours without being strictly linear:
To begin I loosely sketched out some key outlines and looked for the elements which, to me, felt most characteristic of such a plug - the pins, screws and cable mostly. Here I was aiming to approximate the overall shape and create a sense of scale. So that's why some of the edges are rather casual and parts of the picture are transparent:
With this skeleton in place I grabbed my pen and planned to choose the key lines which I wished to retain - intending to erase the guidelines. This left me with a more clearly defined plug and an initial effort to add some shading. In some respects this worked, as it's obvious what you're looking at, but the pins are far too skinny and the perspective isn't quite right (although it's not awful):
