Today my excitement about sketching a composition with these three pears quickly went from enthusiasm to frustration once I started actually drawing on my paper. My intention was to explore finding the overall geometric shape of the composition — where its tallest and widest points meet. In this case, I saw a triangle.

This was really challenging for me, and once I started laying my lines in I became aware of how when my highest point isn’t at the horizontal center, there’s a lot more measuring that needs to be done. I had a lot of trouble getting the pears to fit into the triangle well in relation to each other as well as keeping them from looking distorted.

My sketch layered on a photo of the still life.

In this photo of the drawing overlaid on a photo reference of my view, I can see that one main issue is I didn’t bring the pear on the right all the way to the bottom of my bounding shape, so everything is vertically smooshed. And while the overall shape could be described as a triangle, the lower right corner doesn’t match up with what I envisioned and drew. I got the lower right corner confused with the outer edge of the pear on the right and it really threw me off.

Some improvements I could make to this process next time are:

• decide if I want my vertical and horizontal foundation lines to be at the center of my drawing area or some other landmark (such as the center of the tallest item)
• mark the ground plane early on for a landmark reference
• mark the major angles in relationship to each other instead of creating a geometric bounding shape to work within