A few years ago I visited the venerable hat shop of Lock & Co. Hatters for a birthday treat; I rather like hats and have always fancied owning a proper hat made by a real hatter. It's a great piece of headgear which has seen many adventures but, by now, it's starting to look a touch battered. This does, of course, make it a perfect article to sketch:
The interesting thing about this, as an object, is that it's all about shading; the material (apart from the band) is uniform and it's more or less monochrome in direct sunlight. So any form has to be produced through closely observed tones and, after lining out the basic shape, this is where I focused my attention. The tricky part, in my mind, was generating enough contrast as there just wasn't much difference between the highlights and lowlights (as is clear from the photograph). Picking out the shadow areas very darkly helped though I think:
What I rather like about the end result is that it's very much a picture of a hat which has seen a decent amount of use; it's a bit battered, somewhat squashed and a little rough around the edges. So it has character and I think that I've managed to capture some of this spirit. Quite possibly the shading could me more subtle and blended with less graininess but the overall picture works and that's really what I'm looking for.