Changing Styles Halfway Through

I have been cheating with my sketchbook project.  Certainly not every day, and I am struggling to keep up with one a week, which is very disappointing, but I will muddle through.  The cheating comes in where I try to use my sketch as my daily sketch as well as an Ink Puddle posting, but in my defense, I really need to post more often, so I gotta do what I I gotta do, right?

Anyway, as I working on this sketch, it came to me that I could use it to illustrate a point about artistic styles and the need to sometimes change a style midway through a project.

This and other sketches at http://sketches.inkpuddle.com

I feel like I did a better job here.

I started off this sketch as a representational piece.  Like I have done with other sketches, I wanted to capture the likeness of the object.  I have done this with more success elsewhere.  With my sketch of Toledo (Roman knight of sorts), I tried to draw what I saw, which is to say, the statue of this knight.  And I think I did a pretty good job.  It is incomplete and I get a little stylistic with the lines, but overall, I think it looks like the statue looks like in real life.

When I started with the mug, I knew I was setting the standard high, because for me, drawing cylinder shapes (multiple rings or circles), getting their curves and proportions right, is very difficult.  Not for everybody, mind you, and I am sure there are tricks to doing it better, but I find capturing the curves and shadows of things like glassware to be very difficult.

So, as I continued drawing the sketch, and being disappointed with it, I decided to take the approach in a new direction. I decided I was going to be more stylistic with my lines, mimicking in a way the lines of van Gogh.  If I couldn't get the proportions and curves right, I would flood the piece with lines and curves, and be a bit more abstract, although abstract is not the right word.  Let's stick with "stylistic," because I shifted the focus of the piece from accurately representing the actual object in real life to creating a stylized beer mug object, with its own kind of presence.  "This is not a mug."  I added more and more lines, added yellows and light oranges to fill in the blank space.  In some previous sketches in this brown paper sketchbook (it's actually a Paperchase brand photo album with a heavy kind of craft paper), I left a lot of empty space.  Here I tried to fill as much of it as possible, even if it was with light yellows.  And then I added blocky, chunky yellow strokes as a kind of background / false horizon for the sketch.  Again, this was done as a kind of way of reinforcing that this was no longer a representational piece.

Clearly, this change of direction in style and purpose arose out of a failure of sorts.  I could not properly fix the curves and proportions to my satisfaction for it to be a well-done representational / only slightly stylized piece, so I went all the stylized.  And I am much more satisfied with its completion.  Cheating?  Taking the easy way out?  I don't think so, because I still worked on it to the best of my ability and to the point where I thought it was completed.