Blueprint for Pears 
Pencil sketch of two pears
Blueprint for Pears began as a pencil sketch (second image) that was done during a recent sketch-and-meet zoom meeting for the local illustrators’ chapter of GNSI, Guild of Natural Science Illustrators-Fingerlakes chapter. I began coloring the pears (as I did for a previous piece in this Salon, “Two Eggs”). But for some reason, before I started on the second pear, the idea popped into my head of leaving it just partly colored, and from there the full-blown concept of a blueprint emerged — no idea why but that is part of the fun of creation! Producing that was great fun, though also a bit tedious when I began removing the grid lines that covered the original image… why did I DO it that way???… and it was necessary to look up some images of blueprints to get things right. But this finished piece does make me feel happy when I look at it.
Margie that’s marvelous. I think the drawing and sketching is good for you right now, it’s really letting your mind open and your creativity flow. I love it!
I worked for a naval architecture firm and then a manufacturer doing drafting in my youth. I have always loved those drawings. This combination of sketch and blueprint is great fun. I imagine some higher being designing her new creation – the pear! Delicious!
Eva, you caught the spirit that grabbed hold of me, so accurately! That is what was in my mind as the blueprint began to take shape. (Isn’t it interesting that very often the viewer sees something that adds to the originator’s ideas… something that always intrigues me … though in this case we were on the same page, as it were, and that is also satisfying: that we communicated!) And by the way, the lefthand pear was indeed delicious — the uncolored one was a bit too far gone!
The blueprint drawing reminds me of notes a sculptor might make to envision scale. The sketchbook drawings of Leonardo da Vinci also come to mind! The beauty, however, lies in the restrained color, as well as the visual tension between the sense of hand drawn pears against a very regular grid. My students have been making blueprints in photography. I will show them this and suggest collaging a drawing on top, either with the computer layering in an image editing program, or actual cutting with scissors and pasting with glue.
doing a series with this pear and blueprint might not mean just finding another object to put on a blue print – the beauty of his work comes, as Jan says from the tension between the hand drawn and the mechanical regularity, the sense of suggestion by contrasting finished with the unfinished. Maybe the juxtaposition of two objects that don’t belong with each other, or an object that occurs naturally, with the absurd idea of a person having designed it and determined its contours and dimensions. There’s a lot of complexity to this simple piece.