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measuring the "standard
unit" |
...continued from previous page. Click HERE for the fruit
photo.
See the right edge of the slice in the sliced apple? That line
is a fairly straight line, pretty centered in the photo, and
looks like a nice medium-length line in relation to the rest
of the photo. If you haven't already done so, click on the
small photo to get the large photo and hold your pencil as above and
place the tip of the pencil at the top of the slice and
position your finger or thumb at the bottom of the slice like this.
This will be your "standard unit" for this drawing.
To get the sizes and proportions right in this drawing, measure everything
using this measurement.
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measuring the other side of the slice. |
About a third of the way up from the bottom of your paper,
draw a vertical line that represents the side of the apple
slice. Make this vertical line about the same length as you
measured on the apple. Now, keeping your "standard unit" with your
finger on your pencil, measure the widest point of the other
side of the slice by putting your finger right at the line of
the apple slice. See that the other side of the slice is just
about half of you standard unit? On your drawing, measure your
standard unit, turn it 90 degrees like you did on the photo,
and make a mental note as to where half of your standard unit
is. Now, draw the crescent moon shape of the other side of the
slice and make sure the widest part of the crescent is about
half the standard unit.
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measuring the other side of the apple. |
Now, still using your standard unit, on the photo, measure the
other side of the apple. Do you see that at the middle of
the other side of the apple is also about half a
"standard unit"? So, on your drawing, get your
"standard unit" on your pencil, and putting the tip
of your pencil right on the slice edge, measure about half a standard unit to the right,
make a mental note, and make a
small dot on the paper where you measured to. This will be the
middle point on the right side of the apple. Can you lightly make a
curved line all the way from the bottom edge of the slice
counter-clockwise and connect with your crescent moon shape of
the other slice edge? This will be the contour of the entire
apple.
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Draw the stem. |
The reason I wanted you to lightly draw the contour of the
apple is because you might have to erase a bit of the
top portion of the apple so you can draw in the stem. As you can see, the
stem is slightly above and to the right of the top of the
slice area. the stem is close enough that you probably don't
have to measure the distance from the slice to the stem, just
eyeball it and take your best guess. Draw the contour of the
stem, not just a single line. Remember that a
"contour" is the outside edge of an object. Drawing
just a single line for the stem is one dimensional, if you
draw the contour of an object you get height and width.
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Measuring demo. |
Now you can draw the mango to the left and behind the apple by
just drawing a circle which starts slightly to the right of
the stem of the apple and ends about halfway down the left
edge of the apple. And notice that the widest point on
the mango is also about half a standard unit. Do you see it?
You can do this entire drawing by doing measurements like this. You can even measure the negative spaces in
the same way so all the negative spaces will be correctly spaced between the positive
spaces.
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