Drawing a Wine Bottle and a Wine Glass
Objects can be seen from infinitely many angles. This also means we can draw them from infinitely many angles. Because we tend to see industrial glass objects in a primarily vertical position, does this mean we should only draw them in vertical poses?
If we wish to understand an object’s structure, we can not just keep drawing it from one angle. Different atmospheres and prettier angles are possible with drawing from different perspectives. Drawing the same structure from different perspectives is a great habit to have in order to advance your drawing skills, it gives you challenges to learn from, and if you fail for the first couple of times, you should keep going back until you master whatever you are working on.
I have been continuing to work in an art workshop. In my pursuit of learning glass, I wanted to draw a type of glass there that I never tried there: Wine bottle.
Wine bottles are usually thick, dark green and much more opaque. My art teacher turned the bottle sideways and added a wine glass beside it to have 2 glass objects. She put the glass vertically to have an interesting composition:
I wanted to challenge myself this time. Even though I was sitting about 2 meters across the composition, I wanted to draw as if I was looking at them very nearly. To fit them into the paper better, I also changed the glass’ position. My drawing came out to be a little different than the composition:
While I did not stick with the composition fully, I think I have been able to emphasise my initial aim with the wine bottle, which was to draw as if I was looking at the composition closely.
Because industrial objects like bottles are symmetrical, when drawing them, I always start with drawing an axis (center line). This will ensure that the object stays centred and not crooked even if a very extreme perspective is used.
If we look at a wine bottle directly from a top-down view, or directly from the bottom, we observe that it has a circular cross section. When we put a circle in perspective, it is distorted into the ellipse. Mastering the ellipse is necessary to draw near-perfect bottles.
When drawing from an angle of view that is near the objects, it is important to emphasise the narrowing of the object as it gets further away. This means that the parts of the bottle closer to our point of view should be drawn a bit bigger. For the glass, I did not use narrowing much, as it was a little further from the bottle and standing vertically.
Drawing an object as if I am looking at it closely was a challenge for me. As with any skill, putting obstacles in front of us is the only way to improve. I would like to draw bottles in more different perspectives as well in the future, and mastering the ellipse is the most important way to fulfill this goal.
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