GRAPHITE DRAWING – KITCHENAID FOOD MIXER

Only a couple of days to go before my new pastel pencils arrive, and I can continue with the online art course work. In the meantime I am trying to practise drawing every day (I don’t always manage it but it’s important to keep trying!).

Originally I intended to do another hand study but decided to try something else. I visited ArtProf’s Flickr and had a browse through her reference photos and came across a folder of photos she had taken in a kitchen shop. I love going round kitchen shops – the last time I did, I bought a small food processor and I am using it practically every day! One of the photos in the album stood out for me – a picture of three different models of the famous stand mixer, the KitchenAid. If I had not already got a Kenwood Chef, which I have had for very many years (fabulous, robust machine!) I would have gone for the KitchenAid. Anyway, in the colour photo there was a white one, a black one and a brushed steel one; you can get this mixer in many different colours to co-ordinate with your kitchen.

I downloaded the image and cropped it down to the central one, which was the brushed steel model. I chose this because it showed the difference between a semi-matte reflective surface, and a highly polished one, which require different treatment when drawing them. To achieve a less-shiny effect, the edges of the shadows have to be rendered much more softly, whereas the reflections and shadows on a highly-polished shiny surface tend to have very hard edges. I have struggled with drawing and painting reflective surfaces in the past and years ago someone gave me some advice, that the way to achieve a realistic effect is to ensure that you get sufficient contrast.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of pen and ink work recently, having just completed that module on the art course, and this time I decided to return to graphite. Here is the result.

You can see that the body of the machine, and its base, have a semi-matte finish, whereas the bowl is shiny stainless steel. I think I have rendered these two surfaces sufficiently differently to achieve the desired effect. The drawing is not perfect, though – I haven’t got the angle of the top of the bowl quite correct, and by the time I realised this, it was too late; I would have had to erase a huge amount and I don’t think the paper in this sketchbook would have been up to that. This is, after all, a practice piece.

I was pleased to be able to do this drawing without the aid of the proportional divider. It’s not completely accurate but I think I am managing to train my eye to observe angles and proportions better than at the beginning. I shall continue to hone this skill until I feel 100 percent confident in that area!

This was a very interesting subject to draw, and I really enjoyed it. I was careful to rest my hand on a piece of scrap paper throughout, as graphite smudges like crazy, and when it was finished, after erasing any smudge marks and other bits and pieces in order to tidy up the drawing, I sprayed it with fixative.