Drawing Week 5
For this class we were told to bring organic materials such as sticks,flowers,leaves in various stages of decomposition.I brought along some different types of leaves,a stick.and a few flowers.
The class began with the faculty telling us what to do and how to do it,namely placing the material we’d brought in front of us and drawing a complete render of it.I was excited for this as I personally have always enjoyed drawing plant material (hello bio journal diagrams) and thought I was pretty good at it.The faculty demonstrated how the render was to be done,and I immediately realized that this would take me much longer than I thought it would.
I began the classwork by starting with a stick.I prefer mechanical pencils for these renders since I like keeping a sharp tip constantly and am comfortable with manipulating a mechanical 2B lead.It really helped me get into the crevices that I wanted and add shadow,as well as carefully leave out parts that had lighter areas.
The light and shadow was pretty easy for the stick,but things got a lot more interesting when the leaves came into play.From past experience,I know that the mid-vein and the branched out veins will be lighter/darker as compared to the surrounding leaf.Since I was using pencil as a medium,there was no method of ‘adding’ light (in paint and other color mediums there’s always a white to go back and fix things) and that meant the only way to do so was ‘leaving out’ that area and shading around it.This can often be tricky as I am to use shadows to define the negative spaces between them,and I need to have a prior understanding of what I want my final image to look like in my head.These are what my attempts looked like:
The home assignments given to us were a continuation of classwork,to draw organic and inorganic surfaces found around us.
