Learning Values...in Drawing

 Today we learned about values and shading! My favorite part of drawing! This was a super cool exercise we did. You cover your entire paper in a middle tone gray (mostly vine charcoal and maybe a layer of compressed charcoal). Then we examined a photo placed on the projector. Originally, the photo we were going to be drawing from appeared incredibly blurry. But the objective of the class was to not draw exactly what we saw, but to focus on the various intensities of dark and lightness. So, we use compressed charcoal to emphasize really dark areas (additive areas) and then use our erasers to emphasize really light areas (reductive areas). After each session, our instructor would focus our photo more and more until he showed us the focused picture. It was really cool. Our instructor stated that if he just shown us the picture, we would go straight to one object (can you guess it would be the cow on the bottom right) and not focus on anything else. He wanted us to capture the dark, light, and middle tones of the image first. This drawing is not done, but it was pretty interesting to make. I kind of like it unfinished!

TheChristyBel