Shoe Drawing

The task we were given was to use our three views of a shoe drawing to make three 'zoom and crop' drawings. I used a viewfinder to isolate one part of any of the shoes and drew that bigger on a piece of paper split into three sections. We were supposed to keep zooming in on the same area but I didn't understand that, so I did three different parts of the shoes. Anyway, we then had to choose one of the drawings to make a finished piece out of. I chose the middle drawing. I drew the design on a bigger sheet of paper with pencil after drawing in the borders. I decided to draw flowers and bumble bees as well. After the sketch was done, I colored it with water color and inked it with a micron pen. The subject of my creation is the shoe, flowers, and bees.

I tried to focus mainly on shape design in this drawing. I usually lean more towards sharp angles when drawing instead of rounded curves, just because I find that straight lines make a piece look more graphical. I wanted to branch out a little and try to use rounder shapes. I suppose I could've done a better job as I think the flowers would've looked better if I rounded them out more. I think I did well on the composition, it looks balanced. However, I don't like how many tangents there are in this. Some leaves from the flowers stop at a shoelace and things like that, making it look like the leaf is touching the shoelace when I didn't intend for that. For color, I wanted to make the background a desaturated hue and have some pops of saturation to guide the eye. I used blue for the background and a bright mustard color (though, I think it could've been more saturated) for the flowers and parts of the bees. This piece changed a little as the first insect I wanted to draw for this one was a honey bee, not a bumble bee. I think I drew a couple of those before I realized that a bumble bee would be better for the rounder shapes I wanted to do for this piece, so I changed it.

The very vague story for this piece is about a shoe that got left in a garden or a forest (something like that) and apparently the shoe is really big. I thought that it was a cool concept. The inspiration and how this relates to my life is that when I was little, I played 'shoe tennis' with my neighbors. It was basically a game where we got tennis rackets but instead of a ball we would use a shoe. I remember one time we were playing and lost the shoe in the woods and one of us went home shoeless because we couldn't find it. I imagine that the shoe has flowers and plants around it now. Also, my inspiration for the rounded shapes was one of my favorite visual artists, James Jean. He uses a lot of round lines in his work and it looks really gorgeous. I am most proud of the bumble bees in this drawing, as I've never drawn a single one until I drew this. They're actually quite fun to do, I definitely recommend doing it. I struggled with the tape that I used to prevent the paper from warping too mach when I was painting. I was quite stupid to think that masking tape would come off of non water color paper easily. The tape did grab a bunch of paper and it made the borders look crusty. If I were to do this piece again, I would fix some little things, like the tangents and making sure the coloring isn't patchy. Also use a gentler tape, like washi tape for the borders.