Continuous line

This week's teacher for Sketchbook Skool is Brenda Swenson, with whom I have studied before, so I'm revisiting territory I have covered in the past; but it's always good to go back and get a refresher on techniques, and I love her work, so it's a pleasure. This week's assignments are to do continuous-line drawings in pen--one object, two objects, and three. The three-object one is supposed to be done in a water-soluble pen and then painted, and I haven't gotten to that yet, but here are a few contour drawings:

I had an empty soda bottle sitting on the desk, but the shape wasn't very challenging, so I went for some shadows and reflections and lettering to make it more interesting.









Then I did this candlestick, which was a much more complex object. I badly misjudged the scale and wound up running out of room at the bottom, so it's foreshortened and truncated. Also, all that trim meant multiple line crossings, and I'm not fond of that. I'll try this one again sometime, just for the challenge.

And for my two-object picture, a French press coffee pot and a mug. This one was a good lesson in running your eyes over the objects before committing to running your pen over them, so to speak. When doing continuous-line contour, it's really easy to draw  yourself into a corner and realize--there's no way to get there from here, without lifting the point of my pen! Which you are not allowed to do. So a bit of the coffee pot ended up missing! Sometimes the suggestion is enough, though...

More later.