The Daily Commute

   I take the train to go to school and work. My daily commute is usually very entertaining and includes fun activities like staring blankly at my phones screen hoping it suddenly has something fun to show me and listening to the same old five songs I have on it, because I always forget to update it. Sadly sometimes I forget my headphones and am forced to listen to the sounds of the life surrounding me. On one such faithful day I was sitting on a crowded train ... well not on it - you get what I mean! So I was sitting on the train fascinated by all the different exciting smells, like day old sweat from busy office workers in grey and black suits or the complicated nuances of the multilayered smell coming off of the seats (pee, it's mostly pee). In this amazingly creative environment the floating electron of a stray idea hit me and I decided I was going to draw the train! Creative, I know! So again I got home, did my research, found a picture I liked and sat down with a blank page, a ruler and a pencil. This was the end result.

  This, just as it looks like, is a simple to do, mostly straight lines drawing of an empty train wagon. That being said this did have a few hidden traps waiting to spring on me. The first one was the bend on the ceiling.  As most train cars this one was also not a perfect square, meaning there is a part of the ceiling protruding out. On page it started out as 3 lines connected in the far end of the car.  I used 2 different shades to give it some dimension and then put some parallel lines in two different directions so that the whole section appears as if sticking out. Now, it did take me a few tries to get the angles right so that the bottom part doesn't appear too far away. That being said this part was fairly easy.

  The real difficulty here came from the seats, because you have to make them appear round and shapely. Especially the end of the seat has a specific round edge that helps it appear 3 dimensional. Making the roundness just right was the thing I struggled with the most and if you look closely some of the seats still look flat even though most come across as plausible. 

   The rest is pretty straight forward, I used some simple shading to give it some tones and separate all of the objects, used a softer pencil to darken some of the sharper lines and called it a day. I know I can improve on this drawing and maybe someday I will but for all intents and purposes I'm done with it for now. It was a good exercise and came out simple but nice. I did draw the endless train but if you didn't know any better you might think it was on purpose, right? Right! Even though my baby is still in the hippo category I'm now the mommy of a handsome young hipposter.