I chose simple wooden musical instruments: Maracas (wooden stick attached to a coconut bowl which is filled with rough sand) and Cuban claves (cylindrical wooden sticks that are struck together to set the rhythm of a piece). I tried out three arrangements:
- Landscape format, light from the side and viewpoint at 90° from the light source (top sketch)
The objects were placed almost by chance next to each other, without many overlapping areas. I liked this composition for its simplicity and unpretentiousness.
- Square format, light and viewpoint from above (left bottom sketch)
This was a chosen arrangement. I preferred having the three maracas together and the two claves to form small groups, rather than mixing them together. This felt more correct, maybe because it corresponds to the way these objects are used – a player typically has one or two Maracas in each hand and shuffles them rhythmically. Alternatively, he’d use the two clave sticks together, one in each hand. The light from above accounted for very short shades which helped to draw out the objects’ contours very clearly. I also found it easier to detect reflected lights on the lower parts of the objects, compared to the other two arrangements.
- Tall format with light from the right front (right bottom sketch)
I arranged the objects behind each other, so that when I looked at them frontally, they would “pile up” in perspective to fit into a tall format. This was the most difficult arrangement in terms of perspective, because the objects’ handles were extremely shortened when they pointed away from the viewer. There were many overlappings between the objects, and in the drawing the objects appear a bit “too close together” for my taste. Probably I should have placed them at more distance, this would also have helped to fill up the whole tall format, rather than squeezing the objects in the middle of the page. I found it also very difficult to draw a the dark coconut bellies of the maracas against their own dark cast shade – there were no easily identifiable contour lines, so the consequence would be to have undefined edges at these points. This would have worked better when colour helps to differentiate the objects. For a black and white pencil drawing, these were areas of not enough contrast.
I used a refillable graphite pen for the first composition, but found the grey tones not dark enough and therefore switched to 3B pencil for the remainder.
From the compositions, I preferred to have my objects completely depicted. I felt rather uncomfortable when the objects crossed the frame that I had set for the thumbnail, which happened twice. I found it not natural to cut off objects and therefore completed the drawing outside the initial frame. There was a suggestion in the course materials that cutting off objects would make for a more interesting composition, and maybe that’s true, but it’s not a natural thing for me to do. It’s different for items that are not central, like a table or other background. I have no problem cutting these off.
Despite many self-criticisms, I enjoyed the task and like all three compositional drawings.