Neil CramondStudent 515702

Drawing 1 : Drawing SkillsProject 2 Basic shapes and fundamental form

Exercise 4 Shadows and reflected light.

For this composition, use two objects with reflective surfaces and notice how the light and shadow interplays on the objects. Draw the basic pattern of shadow first, use the white of the paper as your tonal value and build up to your darkest value. Use a putty rubber to pick out the highlights.

For this exercise I chose a stainless steel gravy boat which was highly reflective and a duller metal sugar jar. I placed the objects on a black glass surface and was intrigued by the added reflection from the table. Again looking at the brief I worked quickly to fill the space by using bold strokes of charcoal – I didn’t draw any outline first, just went straight for the shapes of light and dark on the paper. Almost attacked it in fact – this probably explains why the mouth of the gravy boat is not quite right but I was concentrating on capturing the reflective light which came from a patio door to the right hand side of the table. Blocking the colours with charcoal was good fun and again gave me a sense of freedom and I wasn’t too fussy about getting the details and proportions correct. Get the feeling that I’m letting go of my hang up about getting details spot on. I did enjoy picking out the way the surfaces reflected one another and how the curvature of the gravy boat provided lots of different areas of light and dark, and the reflection from the underside was an added challenge. Had I spent more time at the start by just drawing the layout then the gravy boat would be more correctly centred rather than looking slightly offset, but as I mentioned earlier that was not the point of this exercise.