The Spark Of An Idea: Vol. II

Several years ago I found a flattened, old, rusty muffler along the side of the road.  Visually it was quite intriguing, so I picked it up and took it to the studio so that its colors, textures, and shapes might possibly serve as some kind of inspiration/springboard into other works.

This past year I decided to inflict its rich texture-y goodness on my students as an 'object of inspiration'.

But why let them have all of the fun?  I'm the one who found it in the first place.  So I decided to start making some sketches of my own and see what ideas popped up just from the process/activity of drawing.  One of the first things to pique my interest was how the oval openings looked from a raking side view.  So I drew some stylized versions of those.

I was also intrigued by the rusty texture and jagged lines formed by the edges.

The ends are also quite nice -kind of reminiscent of 'industrial metallic Ho-Hos'.

A more top down view of the oval openings kind of reminded me off some of my 'traffic/urban landscape' drawings.

Some of the ideas that came out of these two drawings, are about to find there way into a piece I am currently working.

Here's the drawings.

The final result will show up in a (near) future post.