Glass Half Full

We’ve finally replaced our motley collection of tumblers with some which match, and I’ve been looking at them, on and off, ever since. I really love glass, the way it changes with the light and contents. These tumblers have a bubbly texture on the inside, and are smooth on the outside, an effect which naturally changes when they’re filled with liquid. When lit from one side, there’s a wiggly streak of multi-coloured refracted light which forms on the opposite side. It’s just begging to be painted – a beautiful gamut of greys, blues and yellows with a hint of rainbow.

I thought that rather than going straight in with paint it might be a good idea to try out a pencil sketch first, to get a good understanding of the shapes and contrasts made by the bubbly texture. There was lamplight shining through the glass from the back left, the rest in low light. The glass looked totally delectable.

It turns out that this was quite ambitious, and my drawing shows that I definitely need more careful drawing practice with graphite. More definition would have been helpful, so I think next time I’ll use 2b and 4b instead of 4b and 6b as I did here.  I note that I need to buy a new putty rubber as mine has degraded and is leaving nasty sticky marks on the paper.  I also suspect the sketch would have been more pleasing if I’d added in a shadow to ground it, and perhaps suggested some of the paraphernalia which was also on the table at the time of drawing. Next time. On the plus side, I observed the glass very closely, and if I do decide to paint it in the future I’ll be able to draw on what I learned. It might take me some time to build up to this, though!