Yesterday’s drawing class was great - my favorite one yet! We spent the first half of the class reviewing everyone’s homework, which was extremely helpful. Last week we covered perspective and we were all pretty hung up on the implementation of it in one way or another. So it was great to see everyone’s work and to discuss, ask questions, and learn together what worked and what didn’t and why. I learned so much more from reviewing each other’s work than I did last week while trying to implement the concepts myself. It was great!
Then we learned about tone and used charcoal to make tone-drawings. I’ve never been interested in charcoal because it seemed messy and high maintenance to me. But wow, was it fun! I like it so much better than the graphite line drawings we’ve been doing, but I understand that all of that foundation was necessary for us to be able to execute a drawing like this.
I’ve been struggling with tone in my ink and watercolor class. As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to not see enough whites from the get go and apply too much tone from the beginning, which there’s no coming back from.
But in this case, we don’t build up tone in one direction from white, but instead start with the mid-tone and then add and subtract tone in increments from there. This makes learning tone so flexible and forgiving! I’m planning to do more charcoal sketches to help better develop my eye and then translate that learning to improve my ink wash applications in my other class. I’m feeling pretty hopeful that this is going to help me start being able to see tone better!
Also, I’m wildly proud of this drawing. I’ve never done charcoal before and it’s not even a finished piece (if I’d kept going the darks would keep getting darker and the lights lighter), but dang - it still looks so good and the objects look recognizable. It’s the first time I’ve come home with a piece that feels like an actual image instead of just a bunch of unfinished pencil lines. I am feeling super happy about that!