Moving on from learning to see as an artist Claire Watson Garcia's next step is to introduce three-dimensional objects and capturing these through contours. The principle here is that all of the lines, shadows and edges of an object can be rendered in this way to produce a decent likeness of the underlying object. All it takes is some patience and a sensibly chosen subject; so on that basis selecting an elderly onion perhaps wasn't the best choice. Nevertheless this is how it came out:
Now I'm in two minds about this sketch. On one hand I've captured some 'essence of onion' here and the picture definitely doesn't look like my ideal onion; on the other hand I haven't got all that many contour lines and I feel like I've over-complicated the picture. For comparison this is the vegetable in question:
What is interesting is that if I manipulate the photograph a little bit, and add a pencil sketch filter onto the image in black & white, then I can come up with a picture which is closer in spirit to my rendition:
So I think that I'm reasonably happy with my use of negative space (the empty areas which have their own significant shape) and the body of the onion itself. Unfortunately the sprouting stalks were a real challenge to depict using contours and perhaps more tricky than I'm ready for. Cool onion though.