Week 19 - drapery and anatomy of folds
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This
week, I made a composition of draped fabric to learn the anatomy and structure
of fabric folds.
·
Hopefully
with this fabric study I can learn how to apply the anatomy to my other drawings
in the future.
Preparatory Sketches + reference:
·
After setting
up my reference, I started breaking down the composition into the main shapes
and fold shapes. Both fabrics I had were soft fabrics so were likely to form folds.
I can see on this example that there are inert folds, pipe folds, drop folds
and half lock folds. There are some differing points of support on my reference,
from a cabinet and from a top point on the left.
·
With
these sketches I struggled to get the full image onto my page, but I thought
the composition overall was interesting and had some interesting features like
in local value changes and shapes.
·
The
bottom section of the reference was a little messy in folds, and I probably could
have cropped the composition to focus on the larger more interesting folds and
to try and learn the structure of folds better.
|
Reference |
|
Preparatory sketches |
Initial final piece:
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This was
the version of my piece before receiving critique in a fortnightly session. In
this piece, I tried to focus on separating the two fabrics with line weight,
and in general trying to keep the lighting from a single direction.
·
I really
liked the shading on the pipe fold in the top left area, and I thought most of
the shapes were accurate and captured the likeness of the reference. The
shadows and framing also helped the scene establish directional lighting.
·
If I were
to do this again, I would not have added the patterns, and I would have
darkened the brown fabric below so that they properly look like separate materials.
I disliked the addition of the fabric pattern since it looked sloppy, and I
have the usual problem I have of not having dark enough shadows/correct local
values on materials.
|
Render before critique |
Final piece with adjustments:
·
To fix
the values, I darkened the area of the brown fabric overall and I deepened
shadows across the piece overall. I also tried to lighten the highlighted areas
of the piece to further establish the lighting direction. I also smoothed the
general fold shape with better shading blending.
·
I think
this largely made the piece much more cohesive and with more form information.
I feel better overall with the structure of folds, but I think the folds on
this piece could have been better considered,
·
If I were
to do this again, I would have considered the shapes of each fold more
carefully, and also not have the pattern on this fabric even though it does
have the pattern; the level of consistency with these patterns just is not
there, so it looks amateur.
|
Version with edits |
Final Conclusions:
·
I think I
could benefit from doing more pieces with fabric folds as studies, and I find
the logical way of working out the fold structure quite satisfying, and so long
as there are no patterns on the fabric there is nothing to make the fabric
quite tedious.
·
If I were
to do this again, I might have added another fabric or cropped the composition
to the top half to focus on the simple anatomy first rather than the
complicated folds at the bottom.
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