Introduction to Still Life Drawing on Toned Paper

1. Welcome: Everyone welcome to my newest class on still life drawing. My name is Bube. I'm an artist and educator in on Scotia. I've been teaching painting and drawing in real life and online for the past years. This will be the first of a series of classes on to paper drawing, and the goal here is to teach you how you can achieve a high degree of realism working from your midtones outward. I'll go over the tools you need to get the job done before diving into my process for constructing the drawing, bringing up the values, and finally, adding the finishing touches. Along the way, I'll doing useful tips and tricks for a ton paper drawing, shows how you can avoid some common mistakes while working on this new surface. I guarantee by the end of this, you'll have a much deeper understanding of how to create a compelling representation of any still live on tone paper. So if you're ready, a schedule on. 2. Materials & Class project: Right. So for this class, the materials you need are a graphite pencil set, a couple of different ***, a needed one and a pencil one, preferably, a sharpener, a tone sketch pad, and a white colored pencil. If you don't have a white colored pencil, you can use a white pastel pencil, the result should be pretty similar. Basically the tools you need are the same tools you would need for a graphite pencil drawing with the addition of the white color pencil. Just about all of these, you can find at your local art store or shopping online in places like Amazon, errs, Atarama, Dilick, et cetera. I have the brands that I use for the different materials listed on screen, but feel free to use a different brand if you find that it works better for you. Before I let you go, I'll talk briefly about your class projects. Luckily for you, this one is pretty simple. Your task will be to draw and shade a spare on tone paper drawn upon the instructions in the video lessons. Like the food that you drawing, imagine your light source is coming from the per right hand porn and strive for your class separation between your light and shadow values. Addition, the ling of your forms, that is to say how you gradate your values from light to dark is very important. Subtlety, patience and attention to detail will be necessary for you to achieve the results that you are after. If you can successfully share this fare, you'll have a much easier time drawing the fruits when you decide to in spite of the increased level of complexity. However, understand going in that you might have to try more than once more than twice before you get a drawing that you're happy with. But if you stick with it, eventually, the hard work will kay. That's all for now, I see the next one. Bye bye. 3. The Outline : Hello, guys, in this video, we're going to be drawing this pomegranates on gray tone paper. For this drawn, you're going to need a set of graphite pencils, an eraser, a sharpening tool, and a white colored pencil. This tutorial will be the first part of a series of classes on realistic drawing on Tone paper. We will start it from the simple to the complex, and build up our skills as we go. So the first task will be to create an envelope shape for the foots. Using straight lines, you want to make a best guess of the overall gesture of the shape. This parmigant is rectangular with some curves rounding it out, a reality that must be considered as you create your outline. Be wary of overthinking your marks at this stage, you want to trust your eyes and draw what you see before using a divider or anything else to cross check your accuracy. You have to have something on paper first before you can judge whether or not it is exact. Oh. Right now, I have a base shape established. I will still make little tweaks to it as we go along, but it is enough for me to move forward with. It's helpful to draw a center line down the middle of the fruits, particularly because it's tilted at an angle, and we want to maintain symmetry throughout the drawing. At this point, I can begin to define the smaller shapes within the foots, beginning with the calyx of the pomegranates, which is circular overall, or it's on straight lines, creating key angle breaks. Use as few lines as possible, generate some 7-9 to define the shape and ignore any details that you see. The same advice applies the shadow being cast at Calix. The form shadow on the foot is downward sloping. It's also irregular in the pattern it creates along the bed pug line. Also, pay attention to the fact that this pomegraate is about one third shadow and two thirds lights, so we don't want to exaggerate the size of the shadow shape. Else it's going to look inaccurate. A As I'm sketching in the Badg line, my goal is not to mimic exactly what I see in my reference, but to capture the essence of the pattern to create something that looks natural. The key to that aural aesthetic is irregularity in the shapes and cons. If you find that you're struggling with this parts, you might want to try and copy the reference because our instincts as human beings is to repeating patterns. If it's too uniform, it will look weird. Wout approaching the end of this stage, feel free to erase any construction lines, add the smaller shapes in the calyx, and make any other tweaks to the drawing that will better set you up for the valley block in. That's all for now. I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye. 4. Value blockin: With the outline behind us, we are now ready for the value blocking. In this stage, we will be mapping out the larger forms of the fruit, creating our shadow and light values without fully expressing the entire value scale. Starting in the shadow, we want to create one even tone across the board. Use a B or two B pencil preferably and be consistent with the direction of the marks you make. How you apply the tone, a fix how the tone looks, so fight the urge to zigzag or push hard your pencil on the paper. Put the pencil close to edge and draw with your arm more so than your wrist. Eventually, we will add more variation within the shadows, but for now, we don't need them. For the cash shadow, think of it as an incomplete ellipse. You don't want to make it too round like a circle or too elongated either. Once you draw that out, build up the value in the shape to match the rest of the shadows in the form of the fit. If you want you going to cross had like I'm doing here, as long as there's consistency to the hatching, the results will be just fine. Our basic light and shadow dichotomy that has now been created. Now is the time to return to the shadow and begin to develop the values. You can break the form shadow into two basic parts. The core shadow and an area of reflected lights. The core shadow is the part of the shadow where light is the most included or absent, and consequently it is the darkest parts of the form shadow. It does not benefit from direct lights or reflected light for that matter. Start defining the core shadow with your two B and four B pencils, layering them one step at a time, and gradually building up a value to near full saturation. Pay calls attention to the surface area of the core shadow and make sure to leave room at the bottom for where the reflected lights will have its influence. Now, I'm going to go with a lighter pencil and darken the reflected light, making sure the section which is receiving less light is a little darker than the rest. In the shadow cast by the calyx, we have two distinct values with soft edges connecting them both. While we're on the topic of edges, most of the edges on the inside of the form will be soft or lost with a few hard edges in areas where the form turned abruptly. We'll get into your details of this later on. But do keep in mind that to soften edge, you have to use an intermediate value between the areas you're trying to blend. The next step will be to use your HP and each pencils to create half tones around the bedbug line, AK, the point at which shadow mets lights, Mt up those values one layer at a time and keep the variations in the values to a minimum. Because you're drawing on to on paper, the value of the paper will be the bridge between the half tones we create now, and the lights will create that white pencil later on. Before I go any further up the drawing, I'll soften the tone we have in the cast shadow of the tissue, just e create some variation in the aesthetic quality of the drawing. This step is optional, but maybe beneficial if your values appear too rough. Under. Now it's time to pull out your white color pencil to create the highlights. We waited until the end to do this because the highlight is not really a part of the form of the pomegranate, but it's still unimportant elements nonetheless. Think of it as icing on the cake. Icing is great, but useless if the cake sucks. Using our reference photo as a guide, we will start with the brightest part of the highlight and move outwards from that center with slightly darker versions of it. The highlight is giving the same attention as any other parts of the drawing. Layer carefully, soften the edges between the values of control pressure and create the soft but specific shapes that you see. Before I wrap up this stage, I'll go back to the bedrock line with my B pencil and increase the sense of reform turning by darkening the half pones closest to the shadows. We don't want to overdo this and make the hafnes too dark, just a minor modification to get us closer to a sense of three dimensionality. 5. Shading the shadows: From now on in this drawing, we're going to be making marks with the end result fully in mind. Beginning in the shadows, we're going to establish the lower limits of our value scale and develop the tones to the maximum darkness. I'll start with the core shadow because it's the darkest part of the shadow, and patiently build it up one layer at a time until I'm happy with both the surface area covers and the value. If you notice, I'm consistent with the direction of my pencil strokes, and I'm not jumping around all over the picture. As a beginner, you can make your life easier by ticking things one section at a time, so you don't get overwhelmed by the complexity of your reference image. Another thing to keep in mind is that pencils, especially the darker ones, get blunts really fast. So you want to develop the habit of constantly sharpening them so you can get even tone. Along those lines, you needed esa is your best friend. Use it to pick out the inconsistencies in the tone and go over those areas with a lighter pencil if you got two lights. The same methodology applies with the reflected light. Stop by building up your values in the darkest areas and move outwards to the parts catching more lights. A common mistake here is to make the reflected light too bright as though it is a part of the light family. The lightest part of the shadow, either reflected light, still needs to be darker than any value in the light family. The second most common mistake is to create hard edges between the core shadow and the reflected lights. They should blend seamlessly and merge optically when you squint your eyes. So make the efforts to blend the edges, not by smudging, but by sheeting the appropriate intermediate value between the two. If I go a bit too dark in an area, I just take up some of the excess grab bite with my sa, and then go over the area again till I achieve my desired value. With my shadows, I try to err on the side of being too dark, and then dally back light if I go too far. In the shadow cast by the calyx, we have the occlusion shadow and the cast shadow. The pipe light is the most ocluded, and the rest of it but we might be getting some bound slights. The specific names don't matter too much. What we care about is that there is a darker section and light section, and the values here should be in harmony with the values we have hilto established. So make sure that as you work, you dart your eyes back to the form shadow and make any necessary adjustments. On the inside of the calyx, we see some complexity we have to simplify. My strategy is to get the values figured, ignore the details in the form of the specular highlights and create a base that I can work out from. Then get my ersa to start adding details and go over those areas still with my pencil to blend them in with the environments. You don't want all the highlights to be the exact same value if you care about natural looking fruits. We can also soften the edges around the right side of the Calyx, to merge them with the dark half tones in that region before returning to the calyx to harden some edges and add more detail. And the next video will render the cash of the fruits, applying the same principles and striving for a realistic looking fish. Thank you, and I'll see you soon. Bye bye. D. 6. Refining the forms/Finishing touches: With our shadows firmly established, what remains is to give life to the lights in our picture. We will start at the bedbug line using our HB and B pencils primarily to gradate the valley from shadow to half toe. As always be consistent with the marks that you make. You can cross hatch hatch stiple, whatever, just make marks all over the place. In the reference, you can see this band of value growing across the fruits representing the darkest hac tones. This is our primary focus, approximating the shape values and the edges surrounding it. As you're just focusing on getting the shape rights, then the value, and finally the edges. Breaking it down this way, we allow your brain to process the information more easily and hopefully lead to a better result. For the shape, all that matter is that you come close to what you see in your reference, and you remember that this is a value shape, so it should be soft and not easily identifiable. This is realism after all, and when you see pomegranate in real life, you're not going to see the shapes in the part of form with hard edges. As for the values in this section, they can only be correct in relation to what is already present. So given that the halftones are in the life family, we cannot allow them to get darker than our existing shadows. And this is just going to take practice. You have to routinely check backing with your shadows as your halftones darken to make sure you're not encroaching on that territory. Now, this is a real thumb and something we should follow. However, there are exceptions to the rule, and even in this reference image, they are parts of the reflected lights that are actually lighter than our darker halftones. For the sake of simplicity and avoid confusion, keep the lights and shadow values separate from each other. Moving on to the edges, the ones we have where lights in shadow are on the whole soft and in some areas lost. No hard edges in sides. This is because the degree of turn or the curvature of the foot as it moves from shadow to wide is gradual as opposed to the sharp change in direction, you would have any staircase or the example I have on screen. The sharper the change in angle relative to the light source, the more likely you are to have a hard edge. If you're unsure about whether the edge is soft enough, ask yourself if you can clearly see the demarcation between the two values in question. If the answer is, yes, the edges need to be softer. After this set of half tones will progress to the lighter values in the fruits, switching to our H and two pencils, and merging the gap between these values here and the values of our paper. While I do this, you notice I bounce around the picture, softening some edges around the ca shadow and hardening others on the outside contours of the fruits. Because we are drawn on tone paper, we don't have as much work as we ordinarily would. You can let the value of the paper do its job as a midtone and then go in and fill in the holes. Revising the highlight, I'm not trying to do a whole lot. However, I do feel the edges can be softened a bit and the intensity of the highlight improved upon. After this point, my goal is to re fine tune the value transitions of the drawing. Identifying areas inside of the form with edges that are too hard or soft, values that are in line with the overall light effects, and parts of the outline that can be enhanced. A value should move from light to dark in this direction. When you step back from your drawing, the values and edges should all harmonize well together. Oh Oh. The last elements of this drawing will be the shadow cast by the fruit itself. If you remember from previous lessons, the shadow is made up of two parts, the occlusion and the rest of the can shadow. The form of being darker with sharper edges and the latter lighter with soft edges. I'm going to start by creating a shape for the occlusion and layering until I get to the appropriate level of darkness for that area. Once I'm there, I'll begin to fine tune the edges surrounding it. Understanding that everything around it will become lighter because of how our eyes work. An object is dark or light in relation to what's around it. On screen currently, we have the exact same value, but it appears differently when we put it in a white square versus the black square. The point of this illustration is to see that all the values right here are going to get lighter, so you need to go back in and darken them as you develop this gas shadow. This part of the drawing actually take a long time despite it being a non complex area. I attribute this mostly to the largeness of the surface area and the fact that the values are really dark. At this point, you understand that you have to lay patiently, that how you apply your tone matters and you should never get in the zone where you aren't cross referencing what you're doing with the rest of the drawing. Once you're done with the eclion, we can move onto the rest of the shadow, you can break this part down into two major value groups with soft are disconnecting the two. As you layer your values, you notice there will be some areas of visual noise, wherein the tone will be too dark or too light relative to what's around it. To resolve this, you can use your need ray set to pick up a dark sportive precision and go over lighter areas with the darker pencil to create the evenness that we need for a realistic looking finish. Beyond that point, I suggest taking a step back, looking at your drawing from a distance, and going in at fixing issues that arise on mistakes that you see that call your attention. With that said, it's been a pleasure spending this time with you guys. I hope you're able to take a thing or two out of these video lessons, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. Bye bye. And take care.