Sometimes it's nice to just sketch something small and almost insignificant rather than going for the bigger picture; I firmly believe that with enough skill anything can make a decent picture. The difficulty lies in gaining that skill! So today I decided that my humble pencil sharpener deserved a turn in the limelight and so I positioned it to catch the light and ended up with this:
What's interesting is that I tried really hard to get the proportions and angles of the sharpener right; with the openings for the pencils this entailed drawing ellipses and then rubbing them out a number of times before I realised that they were orientated from the top-left down to the bottom-right. Before then they just didn't sit properly in the face of the sharpener but with this subtle change they looked just right. It's amazing how difficult it is to see such key details and yet they make all of the difference in the world:
Even so my representation of the sharpener has several obvious flaws; the pencil holes aren't large enough and it doesn't taper enough down to the thin end. Still I like the look of the blades and the screws look good even if they aren't large enough. I really should have paid more attention to perspective though as the two sides of the sharpener don't appear parallel even though I've drawn them like that. Another useful learning exercise then!