Learning to Draw | State of Progress | Day #11

Welcome to another installment of my artist apprentice diary.

This time I go back to the still lifes. In the beautiful path of the discovery of the drawing that I am living, I found that what I like most is the chiaroscuro, play with the spots, lights, shadows and volumes.

So the teacher told me that it would be best to go back to the still lifes to work the chiaroscuro. So he proposed as an exercise the following scene:

As always, and even if it's the worst I get, I had to start drawing the outline of the objects. It is a task that costs me a lot, I spend my time erasing and redrawing over and over again :p

The teacher told me that since we are going to try to capture the lighting of the scene it was necessary that I also draw the contours of the shadows casted on the wall.

Once I had everything drawn, and although the central bottle was still wrong proportions, as the exercise was of chiaroscuro and not of drawing I went ahead.

The next step was to start synthesizing lights and shadows in two tones. An apparently simple exercise but at the moment of truth it is not so much.

Unconsciously my brain forced me to represent the details. That is a mistake since the exercise is about synthesizing and understanding the basis of what is happening. In spite of everything I tried to follow the instructions of my teacher.

Once I had raised the light and the basic volumes I began to draw the details. It was a very long process of putting coal and removing, putting and removing. I also started to get the highlights.

Since the paper no longer admitted coal and I still did not have the dark enough black ones, I gave it a coat of lacquer to fix what I had already drawn. From then on I was able to continue adding charcoal on top and get more shades of dark gray.

Once I had it all more or less represented the final touches were to get the strongest shine with an eraser.

I hope you liked this new job. I know it's a long way from being a good job, but at least I had a lot of fun doing it and I'm still learning in every line I draw.

Thank you for joining me on this wonderful path.

Here you can find the previous days:
Day #1 | Day #2 | Day #3 | Day #4 | Day #5 | Day #6 | Day #7 | Day #8 | Day #9 | Day #10