I had almost completed my drawing, and was comparing it to the photo I liked best of my set-up. I noticed that the point-of-view in the drawing was slightly higher than that in the photo. I think that when I took the photo, I had held the camera lower than my eye level to get rid of some of the parallax. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before! Much as I tried to convince myself that the higher vantage point was fine (to save myself having to re-draw!), I really preferred the lower. It seemed to make the line of bricks more imposing and taller. Below is the drawing, and below that, the photo that I liked.
It’s subtle, but you can see that there is less of the tops of things visible, and the ellipses are shallower in the photo. I lowered my stool a bit to lower my view. Drawing the changes I saw was more complicated than I thought it’d be. As my point-of-view got lower, there was more vertical space seen through my view-finder. If I kept the bottom cut-off point of the set-up the same, I now had more space at the top, above the top of the black vase. I can always trim down the composition at the top a bit, if I like this new drawing. Thankfully, the horizontal measurements remained the same, so I didn’t have to re-measure everything!
Above you can see some corrections. The lines perpendicular to the picture plane are receding at a shallower angle, and the top surfaces of the bricks appear narrower. It’s a pain re-drawing all of my carefully observed work, but as my husband pointed out, it will take a lot longer to paint the picture, so I might as well get it right at the beginning! If I had left it, I’d always be unhappy that I hadn’t made it just the way I want it.
Linda Mann Artist 