Exercise 1.4, 1.5, 1.6: Shadow and Line

Exercise 1.4

I apparently didn’t take a picture of my setup, nor any intermediary drawings. That is something I need to work on as I progress in this course. I did better in the 1.5, and 1.6. This was drawn before my first conversation with my Tutor, and before capturing process was reinforced in my mind.

I’m in my comfort zone here. Anytime I can draw lines, and smudge things — whether with stomp, or fingers — I’m going to spend hours working through the drawing.

Observations of what I’ve done here. I need to plan better — the gum pack looks super strange. the handle of the mug is twisted, which would make for a very uncomfortable cup of tea.

I like how I captured the edge of the urn through the glass bottle. Its a bit subtle, I think, but I really like that.

Exercise 1.5

A block of gym chalk, and a baseball, in conte

Here I tried not to use any lines, and do no structural planning other than blocking in areas of tone. I found it very annoying that my conte wasn’t very flat so the tone wasn’t even.

Building up layers of tone, and just spending huge time looking at the reference, was very satisfying.

Then bringing in the eraser to push tone about, and build up layers of hash marks, then getting my fingers into the conte to smudge and smear.

This was very satisfying to draw. I really like the baseball in the final image though the stitching reminds me of sutures and this adds some body horror to the image.

Exercise 1.6

I was disappointed with what I did for the warmup. I couldn’t get into it, and I think it has to do with the size that I was working with. I wasn’t comfortable making such large marks, in such a confined space. I do think I did okay with the values, however.

Throughout the week, after work, I put some time into an imagined wicker-like sphere. Just putting in more practice trying to capture a texture. As I look at it here, on the screen, I could have done better with the core shadow.

Back to still life, and trying to render only with lines but not contour. This was fun, though very frustrating. Unlike the prior couple exercises, I set up a camera to record these two drawings.

Graphite Version

I did a quick structure layout with the graphite stick, and then remembered to turn on the recording. The stick of graphite was not very precise and I had to keep changing how I was holding it in order to vary up the marks I was making. As it was very soft, I couldn’t stay with one posture long before all precision was lost.

I tried to build up the tone here, via laying hatching.

I think this version was largely successful, and looks more natural than the ink version. To an extent, at any rate.

Ink Version

I intentionally did no planning here. I used a fairly fine Zig brush pen, and controlling it was a challenge. Very often I was moving too fast for the ink to lay down smoothly. Looking at the drawing now, there are very few straight vertical lines. The tall bottle as an interesting bend to it, and the small styrofoam sphere is compressed horizontally.

I like the hint of surreal that the badly realized perspective brings. If I’d have done it intentionally, I’d be happier.