Drawing Analysis - Blog Post #2

Throughout class last week, we discussed the multiple elements involved in drawings and learned how all of them play an important role in the final product. This was certainly helpful for me as I always had trouble breaking works of art down upon seeing them; I used to just kind of assume these talented artists just went from point A to point B and then that was it, they ended up with these great pieces. Now, however, I understand that there are all kinds of different steps taken in the creation of the drawings, and it makes it easier for me to spot ways in which the art was made.

This is the case in Study for a Design of a Stadium to Watch the Stars, a graphite drawing made by Ettore Sottsass which is part of his "The Planet as Festival" series. The series illustrates the idea of a society in which people do not work and are not constrained by cultural pressures.

In this drawing, we can see the foreground, being the overlapping stadium in the front; the middleground as the terrain behind the stadium, and the background which would be the ocean all the way in the back. The horizon line is clearly established, as the sky is separated from everything happening below.

There are a lot of different kinds of lines used in this drawing. For example, there are a lot of contour lines used for the stadium. The stairs, overall structure, and even the columns in the middle are all drawn using lines similar in length, effectively outlining everything without shading very much. However, the smaller structure overlapping the stadium definitely has a lot more shading and variation in lines drawn. The same goes for the area behind the stadium; while there are still some contour lines, they are accompanied by thicker lines and some shading.

Speaking of shading, note the different values present in this piece. The stadium and ground beneath it, for instance, is relatively light; there is some shading but it's nothing too drastic, such as the hatching used on the ground. The building in the very front, however, has a very dark cone-shaped structure at the top, and has some darker areas around the circular portions of it as well. Even tiny areas of the drawing, such as the little palm tree by the stadium or the rubble surrounding it has variations in shading. And we can of course see the same thing happening in the background as well with the rocky terrain; there are some areas that are light, but other parts, like the roads sloping down from the beach, are very dark. The sky is itself a value range too, going from dark to light the further it moves down.