Starting the new year 2021

It’s the last day of 2020, I completed another drawing in my exercise series, an A4 rendition of a South African Railways Class 15F steam locomotive.

SAR class 15F steam locomotive

The drawing is based on a photograph I took in about 1982 somewhere near Johannesburg. I am told these were the mainstay of the South African Railways for many years. The original photograph was taken on slide film with a Canon A1 camera and 50mm lens.

South African Railways class 15F steam locomotive

Drawing process

My approach to these drawings has been to use a device called a ‘scale finder’. It’s a transparent plastic with a grid on it. I place it over the original photograph and tape it in place. Then calculate how many squares of the image I want to use in my composition. I then draw that many squares on the A4 page thus automatically creating the new scale. For most of the works to date where I have used this approach it has been quite easy to map details onto the page.

Scale finder with photograph and A4 drawing

 

When I started work on this locomotive I began to realize that the detail was too fine for my eyesight and too fine to be scaled up with any degree of accuracy. It did not help that my lack of familiarity with the subject meant I had no idea what the objects were that I was trying to represent, nor how the related to one another.

Eventually I put the image into a laptop perched on my drawing table. Then as I worked across the image putting in details, I could zoom in and see what exactly it was I was drawing. This approach helped a great deal, but it has one drawback. I found that drawing from a larger image created a tendency for me to draw the item being observed larger than the scale required.

What this particular exercise brings home to me is that observation is critical. It’s important to recognise shapes and the negative shapes around them. However, it is also important to understand how things are connected up to other parts of the object or structure being drawn.

Creating depth and perspective

To render this drawing I first used the scale finder to work an overall outline and position salient points on the paper. After that I started adding details and shading, starting from the left of the paper (I am right handed).

The challenge with this drawing was to give the impression of perspective. I used two approaches to do this, contrast variations and detail variations. 

Contrast variation

The first was to reduce the tonal contrast as the drawing progressed from left to right. I made more use of soft pencils, 6B and 8B for shadows at the front of the engine, whereas towards the rear I restricted my efforts to 4B. Light areas and items at the front of the train where appropriate were left as white, or brought back towards white with the putty rubber. Shiny pale items near the rear of the engine were shaded with the 2B pencil to reduce contrast. 

Detail variation

Just as with the contrast variation so I used the same strategy with the level of detail provided. Towards the rear of the engine, I was less concerned with detailing all the features and getting it accurate. What this does is increases the effort the viewer has to make to fill in the image. The front part tells them what it is and their imagination tells them there is a whole steam engine there but its less clear because its further away.