Musings on a Shoe

Shoe?, your going to yourself, what shoe and why musings. For my 3D design class our next assignment is to create a 20 inch (or larger) cardboard shoe. One that could sit in the window of a shoe store. It is suppose to replicate an existing shoe, but be both large and eye catching. From the examples we have in the classroom of previous students work I can tell you that indeed giant shoes can be eye catching. My first problem in achieving this goal is that I think I have the most boring shoes. I have mostly gotten rid of all my heels, and the rest of my shoes tend to be simple loafer lookalikes.  Not that I ever really went in for fancy footware, I value comfort too much. However circumstances could be worse, I could own only a couple pairs of shoes, as I did back in the late 1970's, so I guess I must not complain.

Last year I was drawing shoes for Color and Design I, this year it is reproducing them, obviously Art Instructors love to use shoes. Anyway to make a long story short I still own a pair of shoe boots, see image below, and this is my subject piece.

Our first challenge was to draw the shoe from various angles straight on, sideways, top down, and to trace and outline of the sole of the shoe. I won't bore you with my drawings. Then we had to take measurements of the actual shoe and using a proportion wheel convert the measurements to what they would be if the shoe was 7 inches or 20 inches long instead of its true length. Using the smaller measurements we were then to construct a space sketch out of planes. Below are images of what my shoe space sketch looks like.

Then we had to do charcoal drawings of the finished space sketch (model). Below is one of mine, not wonderful, but as I was almost the only student in the class that had both the model and the sketches I am hoping I got an OK on them. Other students seem to be a bit confused about these sketches and why we do them of the built piece when we have already done drawings of the shoe. I think it is to verify that our models look like the shoe, you sometimes don't really look at something until you have to draw it.

So that is where I am, space sketch done, drawings of space sketch done, and today in class we started building the final 20 inch version of our shoes. Well, I started building, a lot of my fellow students were catching up, either doing their charcoal sketches or their space sketches since they hadn't finished one or both.

I have 3 more images for you today. These are from my Illustration I class. Our last assignment was to use a natural object for an illustration. The instructor brought in a box of objects and allowed us to choose one to illustrate. I chose a shell, see picture to the right, not a great one I know, but the ones without the flash were too blurry, and at least this way you can get an idea of what the shell looks like.

Then we had to draw it on drawing paper. Mine was a bit smaller then he wanted me to use for the finished illustration so I had to copy it and increase the size about 12%.

Next I transferred this image to Bristol board and inked in the lines using mainly stippling. There are a few lines but not many on this Illustration. Instructors comment was that it should be a bit darker in areas. I may go back and do that. Originally I was going to use Micron pens to do the stippling, but I ended up purchasing a set of Mechanical Pens. I probably shouldn't have, but I do love mechanical pens. I have owned sets in the past, and will try to take good care of this one so I don't have to toss any pens do to ink clogging the tips.

One last image for you, between my classwork projects I have been working on another Mandala, this one with a theme of trees, I am using leaves and seeds so far from various tree types. Colors are what I would consider fall colors, sky blue, reds, oranges and yellows with some greens.

That is it for this post, as always comments are welcome.