Month: February 2021

Need to do the shade but a reflective object so difficult to see shadows. I didn’t think of that!

Initial attempt at a snail-shaped egg cup. The hemisphere is particularly tricky to get right. Perhaps should have drawn it as a cube first.

I didn’t feel like drawing today so I just started scribbling and this led me to drawing of waht was in front of me: a plug. This is a good way of getting started when you don’t feel like it or don’t know what to draw – just starts scribbling.

The plug pins were trickty to do. Again, it’s important to draw good guide lines at the beginning. I didn’t do this for the pins, and suffered for it later.

Tried to combine shade with texture on top of the inherent tones of the monkey.

Made the shadow tone on the monkey’s body too much darker than the lighter inherent tone, so it doesn’t look part of the same tonal area (of inherent tone). Need to start lighter and build up to avoid this. It made it more difficult to distinguish areas of darker inherent tone.

Maybe I can use the vocabulary ‘inherent tone’ and ‘transient tone’, where ‘transient tone’ means the tone just due to lighting, not the colour of the object. Need to keep transient tone proportional to the underlying inherent tone, and not to dark or too light otherwise it will look like a different area of inherent tone.

I want to add texture to the monkey but decided to shade the areas of innate tone first (the tone variations on the design of the monkey rather than tone variations due to lighting).

A couple of characters in The Beano.

I just improved the monkey’s eye:

Then I worked out how to change tone and show the monkey’s texture as well. The trick is to shade the background the basic tone then go over it with mark-making:

Quick sketch of a monkey soft toy.

Tried with a 2B and a 4B. A bit smoother if you shade across the area and then rub out the shading that went over the edges. It’s not that different, though. If you need to keep within the edges then it’s best to shade both ways (rectilinear directions). This covers the uneven marks a bit. The biggest problem is keeping the pencil at an equal angle and at equal pressure.

I tried to look more closely and I think improved it a bit. It’s still not quite right, but it’s time to move on.