Next I spotted the old diesel cans (top left) without actually knowing what they were at that point. The challenge here was that people were still going around looking at the lots, standing in my way and picking them up/moving them. In addition a large cloud was looming and every so often I would lose the light/dark contrast.
I moved on and found a great big box of forging tools, of which I drew the three bottom left. Stupidly I had deliberately left the camera in the car so I would be forced to draw, otherwise I would have liked a reference shot of the whole box- a great subject for an abstraction or a print at a later date. A farmer stopped and commented on my drawings- usually I'm quite self-concious but took it in my stride and we discussed old farm implements and tools for a brief spell.
Soon after I spotted the milk churns, and just had to draw them as they are the sort of useful "furniture" to include in a rural landscape, and you see so few these days outside of farm museums which are generally poorly lit, these gave me the opportunity to record them in a natural outdoor setting. I note I'm still not brilliant at getting my ellipses right though!
I was starting to really enjoy myself now and returned to a box of gears I'd seen earlier- actually it may have been a whole gearbox in pieces.
I didn't get the foreshortened axle correct (people moved the piece twice while I was drawing and I may have sidestepped which changed my viewpoint slightly) but I was concentrating on the wonderful intricacy of the cog wheels and the shadow shapes made by their lugs- there are similar shapes to be found at Geevor and I feel I want to create a whole composition from them.
I finally located my husband in the crowd and returned to the car for a drink of water, also to take a few distance shots on the camera of the crowd around the auctioneer as the bidding was well underway. It started to rain at this point so I sat in the car and did a few thumbnails of people talking away from the main crowd, remembering to focus on the shadows and lights as I get completely lost if I try to apply the rules of anatomical proportions. I included a pigsty and a cart as a scale reference.
It was a useful excercise, especially the man bending down, and certainly an improvement on previous attempts.
After spending some time in the crowd as the tractor lots came round, I found an old fuel tank with a beautiful glass top and started to draw it. Once again someone stopped to comment.
I only completed the top section as rain was again threatening and we decided to head home at that point.
I'm finding that I'm going to quite different places to find interesting things to draw, I would never have taken a sketchbook to a farm sale before, but it proved to be a good place to work in the open as most people were there for the sale and not especially interested in what I was doing. It also proved to be a good source of accessories, as with the milk churns, which can be used in compositions later on. Also, it focussed the mind on getting the drawings done, as once a lot was sold they were quickly being collected, so there was some uncertainty as to how long I had.
Oh, and as a bonus, my favourite charity shop later yielded two old Sotheby's art sale catalogues with some great Impressionist and modern (Picasso, Miro, Ernst, Kandinsky) colour plates for less than a fiver! Plus I've finally managed to file all my loose-leaf coursework into binders, so quite a productive day all round!
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