Devsye

I found some new pencils with different blacknesses so I experimented with tone swatches. I’m aiming to have at least three tones plus white. Four tones seem possible but it’s tricky to keep a clean separation in tone because each pencil can look like a darker shade if you press hard enough. It will need control to apply the swatches. I’ll keep the swatches by me so I know when the tone is right for each tone level. I need a reference card.

Still not quite right. Need to check with a grid – lay a grid over the top?

The first sketch, which didn’t go well:

The vase is titlted in relation to its base – why? Because I drew the main axis at an angle.Or the base is at the wrong angle. I only noticed when I scanned the drawing. I need an aid to check as I go along, like a transparent grid. It’s particularly important to use this aid early on, when I’m drawing the axes.

I had two gos because it was difficult to see the edge of the shadow. the pears was dappled with brown, too, which complicated matters.

So these drawings look okay from a distance (sse the small version below), despite their simplicity. Really important to get the basic tonal areas right.

Here are three blocks of shade with the same pressure from different pencils:

You can’t see the difference. In order to make the tone differences obvious you have to press down on the 6B, press a little on the 4B and only press lightly with the 2B:

A good approach here in this irregular ovoid was to pretend the outline was a series of straight lines. That really helped.

I’ll do the shading tomorrow.

I rubbed out the HB shading on the bowl so it is just 6B, 4B and white:

This works okay. I’ve also added more swatches to my earlier swatches:

So I could try 6B, 3B, B and white if I wanted three tones plus white. I’ll carry on for now with just 6B and 2B.

A few points here:

• When I first started I measured the height wrong, so the bowl is the wrong shape. It’s so important to do the first measurements accurately.
• I took a few specular hightlights to be white, and set the tones on the basis of this. This was a mistake. You need to ignore the small areas and set the tone for the larger areas.
• The lighter areas are HB but you can’t see that at all in the scan, so perhaps I should stop using HB. Perhaps I’ll use white, 2B and 6B. But I don’t think this will be enough to make the object real. The above drawing looks like it is three tones (beacuse you can’t see the difference between HB and white), and it looks flat. Three tones don’t allow scope for detail. The trouble with the above was that the background was black, so I couldn’t use 6B on the bowl, just the background. You need to factor in the tone value of the background when planning the drawing. In this situation perhaps I could have used 6B on the bowl, even though there is nowhere on the bowl as dark as the background. Aonther option is to use 2B, 4B and 6B and white. I’ll try that.

A difficult thing to draw, to get the curves and symmetry right.

The problem is, I skewed the central axis.

So 6B, 2B and HB seem to have the best separation. Unfortunately HB doesn’t show up very well in scans. Adding this third tone to the pear:

I guessed the tones because the pear was not in front of me, which of course is bad. Apart from that, there are a few issues:

• Even three tones look clumsy and need soft edges.
• It’s hard to tell where the mid-tone begins and ends. The other two are simpler.
• It’s easy to skew the tonal scale. If you press to hard on the mid-tone them the dark doesn’t look so dark any more, and the picture starts to look flat. And what if you can’t make the dark darker? Also, the light tone can take up too much of the white area, which can make you creep the mid-tone into the light area, then the dark into the mid-tone area, and the whole drawing looks to dark and flat.

So you need to be very clear on the three values, and start with them evn if you will add more, which you will need to to make the drawing more realistic. So the next step is to practice with just these three tones plus white, then add a couple other tones, so we have three mid-tones.