I've been reading the third chapter of Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner and it's all about accuracy. By this I mean refining your ability to draw shapes (lines, ellipses, rectangles etc) which are recognisably the correct shape and don't suffer from distortion. As you might expect there are a wealth of exercises in this chapter but before diving into these I thought that I might return to a couple of my recent contour drawings.
The reason for this is that while my sketches of some random vegetables and a household padlock have both good and bad points they both suffer from a lack of accuracy. So to give myself the physical feeling of drawing lines in the right place, and scaling shapes correctly, I've printed out filtered versions of the reference photos which I took at the time and have overdrawn these images while referring to the model objects.
Looking at the vegetable group (with my original drawing on top) it's clear that one of my bad habits is to unconsciously try and make the end planes of the object more visible. In other words I flattened out the stalks of the two vegetables to make them stand out rather than drawing them to appear vertical. As a result both vegetables look kind of squashed-in and deflated which, I think, distorts the rest of the picture. Also, with the pepper, more rounded lines give a greater sense of volume and freshness while the carrot looks a little more carrot-like at least. Carrots are still hard though:
With the lock picture my contour drawing was more successful but the comparison clearly shows how I twisted the base of the lock round to make it more visible with the knock-on effect being that the key/keyhole are forced to compensate. This also made the body of the lock more bulky than it should have been and the overall proportions suffered. That said I still think that I did alright with the bolt of the lock and its proportions came out reasonably accurately:
