Week two of the Art Class covered the definition of Space. Covering both physical depth, and positive/negative space (positive being an object itself, while negative being the "empty" space around it).
To study this, we had a whole lot of exercises. First of which is a "single line" drawing in ink. To be honest, I'm not a fan of ink as a drawing medium. I like the flexibility of graphite for shading and being able to fix my mistakes, but drawing in Ink certainly helps to hone the production of shapes and make things overall "automatic" with practice.
Next up was the use of "Organizational Lines". Essentially, using lines that help to define the shape and space of objects. As in this piece, the lines are used to position the knobs and sliders of the mixing board, as well as produce the depth required for the slab itself.
Being able to recognize and draw negative space also can be a tool for drawing objects. If you can draw the negative space, the space remaining must be the object!
Another tool for defining dimension and space is the use of Cross Contours. These are literally a cross sectional contour of an object, defining its shape:
Very specific to cross contours, the use of ellipses is paramount to the realistic depiction of cylindrical objects.
Putting it all together, I created a Still life scene and used the tools learned to create the correct proportions and shapes. You can see heavy use of ellipses and organizational lines here.
Last but not least for Week two, using various "value building" techniques to add depth to an ink drawing. We could make any piece we liked, but I decided to indulge my "sci-fi industrial" side. Obviously ink can only give us black on white, so the use of hatching, cross hatching, gestural lines and deliberate cross contours as part of the design (like the sections of pipe) all fulfilled these goals. The final piece has a few issues (mainly there is way too much white still on the page so it really doesn't pop as much as it should), but a solid start at least!
Week Three covered Light and Value. Compared to week two's heavy "drawing" schedule, week three felt almost like a break! There was a lot of photographic work in week three. Mainly, the study of how light, shadow and the values in between can be used to great effect to achieve desired results.
First up, we have "Moody Eggs"! To be specific, I had to use lighting to give some eggs a specific mood. I had to fight the urge to draw the specific facial expressions on them, but in the sake of professionalism, I didn't ;)
After lighting and photographing eggs, it was time to draw one. Specifically, to draw the lighting and the shadow. Each element was then labelled to show our understanding of the way light and shadow interact, and the terminology (We also created two shading scales using both 2H and 6B pencils, to examine the differences; essentially, 2H never gives a dark black, but is ultimately more controllable and even in the shading range, while 6B gives rich dark tones, but tends to be a little granular in the lighter shades).
Object Planes were next up for study, in my case some stacked boxes. Getting the planes defined using light and shade, rather than outlining was the goal of this exercise. Luckily, such shading has always been a favorite technique of mine in the past.
Next was examining "Tonal Range". While a light tonal range certainly gives dimensionality and you can clearly see the form, using a darker, more "rich" range of shading gives additional depth and definition and helps to define some smaller details.
I then took various rubbings of textures from around the house. I used these as inspiration to produce some purely speculative objects (made up by me, not observational sketches) to show how light and value can be used to emulate specific textures on objects. I decided on a "furry ball" and "waffle box".
Next up, I created six different "paper textures" using various techniques. these were then used for later assignments.
First of those later assignments was using our paper textures to produce interesting compositions, then photographing them.
I then used one of those photographs and created a sketch of it, showing full tonal range.
Lastly for Week three was taking the Week two still life, and finally rendering it fully with graphite. While I am overall happy with my final result, I will admit to needing more practice. Areas I need to work on are blending away the pencil strokes, and using a darker tone when possible. Edges also could use some work, but overall, not a bad weeks work!
Week four covers "Linear Perspective". I will post those when I can!
