Unseen ThingsUnseen things assignment- draw something you usually would not notice. I chose a wire shelf with a plant in the front entrance of my house that we never use- the side door is better.
Final Drawing 6. How important was learning the skills and techniques prior to the final drawing?
It was semi-important to learn more skills and techniques. I'm already pretty familiar with shading and blending with only pencils. Learning about how to shade the plant pot might have been helpful, but it's not exactly a shape I could research how to. 7. How did you grow as an artist? I grew as an artist by being dedicated to the darkest values in my drawing. Usually I would have dreaded doing such dark pencil work- but I powered through it and worked my forearms to get the blackest black I could with a 6B pencil. I also got more practice drawing plants and leaves close up with this- I don't think I've done that before. 8. List any obstacles you had to overcome and how you dealt with them. The obstacles I had to overcome would include making sure the darkest shades were properly shaded in evenly. Also, I have never worked with drawing stems/leaves before, so I had to focus when I drew them. Same with decorative metal- It was pretty tedious to draw the little swirls in the wiring behind the plant, but I focused on the white space instead of the wire itself and it helped a lot to mask out the shapes instead of just going for it. |
In progress photos
Critique1. Explain the process you went through to develop your drawing (sketches, planning, in progress, etc).
First, I took multiple photos from different angles of my subject. I then cropped and decided which one had the best composition, increased the contrast, made it black and white, and started to draw. First I focused on the wired part as it was the darkest, then finished with the plant and its leaves. 2. How important is composition to the success of your drawing? Composition is very important to the success of a drawing. For mine I was fascinated by the swirl of the wire, and how it reminded me of the fibonacci spiral. I decided to make the spiral bold and take up 2/3 of the drawing to shove that feature in there. 3. Explain how you found the different values in your object? I found different values in my object by adjusting contrasts and black points when editing the photo to make it greyscale. I noticed the light coming through the window was only reflecting on the plant pot, yet the wire remained dark. Because the shelf was in a corner, it had lots of good shadows too. 4. Did you achieve a full range of the different values within your drawing? How? Yes, I did. I used multiple soft graphite pencils including a 6B pencil to make the wiring as dark as possible. I used an HB pencil to do the lighter parts, and used a light hand. 5. Describe your craftsmanship. Is the artwork executed and crafted neatly? I think I was neat in my execution. One thing I could have worked on is cleaner edges. Another thing I could have added is shading in the background, but I wanted to make the subject really focused. |
Sketch with pencil, finish with pen
I drew a cow print dELiA*s bag. First I did a soft outline with pencil, and reversed an image of my sketch to see what I needed to fix. I had to add more mass to the edges, which helped make the bag look more 3d. I chose to use stippling because there were not a ton of shadows, but I find stippling works really well for metal or reflective things- like the rings connecting the straps, the zipper and the zipper pull. I paid attention to the reflections next to the shadows on the right side of the bag.
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