Sketching Barns
This is a special view for me. It’s the view from my parents’ home, looking across fields and pastures toward the barns of their dairy farm. (Actually, they raise beef cattle now, but I still think of it as a dairy farm, since that was its function when I was growing up.)
I always have to take several shots of this view when I’m visiting my parents. This July photo shows corn with silks on it. But, the winter view, with corn stubs sticking up, is appealing in an entirely different way.
And then, of course, there are the barns and silos. I find their shapes very intriguing. I mean, what other structures are round with either cone shaped or crown shaped roofs? I’ve always thought about making a quilt with these buildings, and in this 2011 sketch, I exaggerated their sizes.
But, instead of showing them spread out, I wanted to cluster them one on top of another. My attempts at composing that had never given me what I wanted. But then, I decided to mimic the idea of this earlier quilt, By the Baltic Sea.
Click any image for a larger view
Why not show some of the barns as outlines only? And let them infringe on other barn shapes? I liked the idea and began to play. I traced each barn shape and scaled them all up and down.
I liked the arrangement above. To reproduce each tracing paper shape onto my sketch book, I turned each one into a little carbon paper sort of thing. With a pencil, I simply traced the lines on the back of each one. Then, I could put it in place, trace the lines again from the front and I’d get the impression on my paper.
For the next sketch, I added the shadows. That’s another interesting idea!
Or, maybe I should consider cropping, even after arriving at a composition I like.
Yep, that’s also very valid.
Gee, it’s fun to take my time with this sort of thing and to allow ideas to develop.
Ellen Lindner
P.S. Since I grew up on a dairy farm as the oldest child, my play pen was, at one point, at the barn. Can you guess my first word? Yep. It was moo.
