Shoescape

This piece is a line contour drawing of a pair of shoes with an added background. The objectives of this project ware to focus on pure line contour, meaning only using lines to create objects and textures and no shading; and to express a part of myself through the observational drawing of a significant pair of shoes and a self-created background.

The process for this piece started with four thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook. These very rough sketches that would let me experiment with different positions for the shoes that would create different angles and amounts of negative space (where the background would be). I used a view finder for these to help myself visually cut of parts of the shoes around the edges. After finishing all four, I chose my favorite and began to draw the shoes in that position. I started by sketching everything lightly, with a 2H or 4H pencil, and then went over all the lines with softer graphite, making them darker. Having finished the shoes I added my background (in harder graphite, making it lighter because it's father away) and a foreground.

I chose these shoes to draw because they were my first skateboarding shoes and skating is part of me because it's something that I enjoy and can do in free time. I chose this specific position for the shoes because it not only showed the tears in the fabric, making it more interesting, it also created a good portion of negative soace in the upper left corner for the background. And since I was drawing skate shoes, I thought that an appropriate background would be a skatepark. At first I had doubts about the foreground, but because my setting was a skatepark, the ground wouldn't realistically be flat. Therefor I added cracks to imitate pavement or cement.