A thought which came to me recently is that while it's great to be drawing something new every day (and I do believe that the constant effort is beneficial) I rarely return to the same item again. So it's tricky to gauge like-for-like progress. Also each sketch can take an hour or more and I'm not entirely certain that spending so much time is a good thing; I'd certainly like to be able to bring out the essence of an object much more quickly.
So I figured that today I'd try something utterly different with one aim in mind: to see what sort of sketch I could come up with when limited by time. To make this more extreme I decided that I would allow only 10 minutes per drawing and no more than an hour in total - so six pictures of the same object with each getting the same amount of attention.
For obvious reasons I needed something simple to draw in this experiment and a teaspoon felt like a decent compromise; simple enough in form and yet with enough shadow to make the subject interesting. Without more ado then this is how things turned out:
Looking at these drawings I can pick out several conclusions but one more than any other; my ability to accurately draw this spoon improved with every drawing as I became used to its shape and learnt from earlier mistakes. I also think that my sensitivity to shadow improved and that the fifth drawing captures the bowl of the spoon most attractively. What's also impressive is that this took just an hour. Given how long I've spent tinkering with other pictures the payback here, in this experiment, is dramatically better.