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Exercise 2.7: An Objective Drawing

An objective drawing is one with accuracy to the form and function of an object without influences from personal feelings about the subject matter. In this exercise, I was asked to produce a simple A4 drawing from a choice of subjects:


Shoe | Umbrella | Pair of trousers | Pair of glasses | Hat


At first, I wasn't immediately drawn towards any of these fashion accessories. It wasn't until after I hunted around my house for examples to take reference images of that I finally settled on a dusty pair of long forgotten 3d glasses that I found buried in the back of a drawer.

Original image reference.

Although glasses like this are a simple overall shape, I wanted to give myself a bit more of a challenge by including the most varied elements that I could in my reference photo and in this case the overlapping sections of transparency, perspective and reflections in the glasses appealed to me.


I chose to use fine liners instead of a pencil as the material that feels the most natural to me when making a more technical piece such as this. I outlined the shape and attempted to achieve the same foreshortening of the glasses and the way the temples folded underneath the plastic lenses. Once the main shape was in place, I filled in the detail using cross hatching where I varied the distance between my lines to created differing tones.

Fine liner illustration.

The result was a high contrast drawing that I feel represents the object with some accuracy, but when comparing to the original photo I can see that I've accidentaly distorted the angle of foreshortening and on the left of the frame I had started to overwork the tones slightly.


Using pencil as a medium instead of pen might have allowed me to achieve more subtle gradients shifts between areas of light but if drawn again using fine liners, I would also change the solid line separating the glare on the left frame as it looks a little distracting on what should be a reflective surface. I could have make this line thinner or perhaps broken it up into sections or to help sell the idea of a reflection on the lens.

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