Laying The Foundation- 017
I took a week to complete an assignment related to work and after I had finished I wanted to have a small break… which ended up being another week.
I kind of regret it now because when I was drawing today I could feel myself struggling with what I was doing but thats the price you pay I guess, use it or lose it as they say!
Today I focused on learning the basics in still life drawing.
At first I thought to myself that this wouldn’t be a necessary thing for me to learn considering my goal is to go into comic-style drawings, but the instructor made a good point, saying that no matter what or how you draw, you’re going to be basing your art off of real life stuff, so this will become a handy aspect of drawing to learn for the future.
Firstly, I learned how to measure the objects you want to draw to get an approximate understanding of how big your drawing should be, by using measurements with your pencil (I always wondered what artists were doing when holding up their pencils or paintbrushes at arms length haha). By doing this, we can ensure that our drawings aren’t too big or too small.
Then I went over the 3 basic sketch types you can use to create a still life drawing; cross hatching, blending and rendering.
Cross hatching involves using cross contouring lines that cross with each other to create different tones in the drawing. Some artists I follow use this technique and I really enjoy it although I don’t see myself using this technique when I have developed my own style.
Blending is the type of sketching that I have been using throughout and the one I’m most comfortable with, which is when you establish your highlight, midtone and core shadow and layer those values until you create a nice blend between all your values.
I didn’t really connect with the rendering style, in all honesty. Rendering is establishing an overall neutral midtone (notice the grey going across the sphere) and then removing the grey to add in a highlight as well as adding in your dark shadows. The idea is that you don’t have to worry about your midtone with this style, but I felt like this was a bit convoluted and toward the end I just ended up blending anyway to salvage it.
Looking forward to getting further into still lifes and excited to get back into posting and practicing drawing again!