Day 49: A corkscrew is an essential part of camping

When you're camping in France (and especially in France) a corkscrew is an essential piece of kit. If you can't enjoy a nice bottle of wine in the evening, while sitting in the sunshine, then things have gone badly wrong in my view - which is exactly why we happened to have one lying about. To be honest I wasn't sure that I could sketch it with any fidelity though given the number of moving parts and specialised shapes:

Corkscrew photo

Nevertheless I began by roughly lining out the key contours and identifying some fundamental shapes (such as the circles around the cogs and the inner barrel of the screw). This involved a fair amount of rubbing out and re-drafting as some of the elements just didn't play nicely together. After a while though I reached a point where I needed to settle on the best lines and to begin adding depth through shading. I rather like the way in which this process brings a drawing out of the paper:

Corkscrew picture

Overall I rather like this picture in that all of the elements (arms, body, handled) seem to match and be realistically joined together. This is partially a matter of shading but at the same time most of the moving parts are in proportion; it's just the cork itself which is too wide and that's only because it isn't long enough! I probably should have added some highlights with an eraser but beyond this quibble I think that the overall effect is rather pleasing.

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