Day 30 #stradaeasel
I’m almost there, everyone! I feel excited and sad at the same time. It has been a lot of fun.
My husband, John, has been so supportive of me during this challenge. We have a routine and usually that includes making dinner together. For the past month, he has been what we call “kitchen boy,” making meals and cleaning up while I’m posting my daily painting or catching up with my day job. He is truly my MVP!
In gratitude to him, I wanted my last day’s painting to be his guitar that sits in the living room, ready for him to pick up at any time. Today I thought that I’d get a set up figured out and a charcoal drawing done in preparation for tomorrow’s painting. Then I would do another oil painting for today. Very ambitious, I know. Overly ambitious, as it turns out.
Today I’m posting my charcoal drawing as my daily painting. It took longer than I expected. I’ve tried drawing guitars before and they are complex subjects.
Guitars are symmetrical but if you’re looking at one at an angle as it is in my set up, then it is no longer symmetrical. The perspective of the far side makes it slightly smaller than the closer side. I had to make numerous measurements to get the proportions right. It’s enough to make a person crazy!
This is a rough drawing to familiarize myself with the composition and work out any problems. You can see I’ve marked the center of each side with a tick mark outside the rectangle that I’ve drawn as the boundary. You can also see that I dated it, which I do with every drawing and this time, I’ve already picked a title. It came to me in a flash once I knew I wanted to a still life of a guitar.
The set up—John’s Takemine guitar is a fixture in our living room. Always there to pick up whenever the muse strikes.
