koukla carolyn

Brown Paper Bag Drawing, graphite in 9×12 kraft paper sketch book, 2008

Brown Paper Bag Drawing 2, graphite in 9×12 kraft paper sketch book, 2008

These are my contributions for EDM 92: draw a brown paper bag. I had gotten this kraft paper sketch book months ago but I had never christened it until recently. I thought this would be a good use for it, because it is similar to the material of the bag itself. I did these in graphite and I spent quite a lot of time on them, although I could have spent quite a lot more if I wanted to be even more accurate.

The first drawing I did by first blocking out all the large areas of the folds and then lightly outlining all the areas of shadow. Then I filled them in kind of like a coloring book. In the second drawing, I sketched out the large folded areas first and then did all the nuanced shadows by observation, without first outlining them. I like my method for number 2 better because it was more fun in general and I don’t normally like a lot of planning. In both drawings I worked from left to right to avoid smudging the pencil. I do have a habit of skipping all over the drawing but I was very disciplined in these cases.

I have been doing quite a lot of drawing lately, compared to my usual standards. I am not sure how much I will do during this week though because I am getting my wisdom teeth extracted today and I’m not sure how I will be feeling.