For the last day of August (and the summer I suppose) I decided to try something a little different. With a baked potato left over from dinner I thought that perhaps, under a strong light, the wrinkles and contours of the vegetable might provide fertile ground for sketching with nothing much but variations in shading. So I lined up my humble potato for its moment in the sun:
Starting with little more than a brief outline my method of working here was somewhat different to the norm; rather than look for obvious contours I, instead, searched out the areas of greatest shadow and roughly shaded out their shapes. This meant leaving the highlights entirely unshaded almost as if I were defining them by an absence of graphite rather than rubbing out material to expose them. This turned into a fairly drawn-out process but in the end I created this:
I must admit that I'm not entirely convinced by this picture. It doesn't look much like a potato but then again the photo wouldn't look much like one except for its colour. What it does look like is an abstract object with a highly textured, wrinkled surface and from this perspective I've been reasonably successful. Most of the surface detail is there and it's clear that something is going on here even if the specifics are obscure. Perhaps I should just pretend that this is a wind-battered rock and leave it at that?