Our most recent Barnstone assignment involved redrawing the three bottles under orthographic projection with geometric constructions for all of the circular cross sections. Here are some learnings:

1. Wash your hands. When you work for hours on a single drawing you don’t want to see fingerprints.
2. Sharpen your pencils often and be sure to wipe off the graphite sharpening dust before drawing.
3. When using a rular or triangle, first place the pencil in the correct position on the paper, then slide the rular up snug against the pencil. This ensures that the line doesn’t end up a half a millimeter away from its intended position.
4. Draw very lightly.
5. It is impossible to get all of the angles an intersections perfect. The important thing is to produce an asthetic drawing and this means balancing between perfection where it counts and errors that don’t matter. In the planar cross sections, each circle construction has four lines that intersect at the center of the circle. I feel it is important to nail this intersection point, so I always place the tip of my pencil directly on the intersection before placing my rular.
6. Start at the top of the bottle and work down, one plane at a time. Don’t attempt to work assembly line style or draw planes out of order. It is too easy to get confused.
7. Rotate the paper, if necessary, so that you always draw on the side of the rular closest to your dominant hand.

We invited our good friends, Chris and Marty, over to help drink the bottle of prosecco that I wanted to use for my Barnestone assignment. The bottle was tall and had these gorgeous curves that complemented my medium height Quinta dos Rouges and my short, but equally curvaceous Perrier bottle. The assignment involved six gestural drawings of each bottle, followed by a detailed, measured drawing of an ensemble of the three bottles on a single page. All told, I spent about 17 hours on the measured drawing, not including the time to drink the prosecco.

Juliette says the point of the assignment is to learn how to see relationships that tie the drawing together, to understand how to break down the structure of the object, to develop line quality, and to work the entire picture at once instead of marching around the contour.