DRAWING CLASS, UNDERSTANDING CONTRAST

This week's class was all about understanding contrast, and translating colour into contrast, see picture above.

This term will be all about comparing high and low contrast in relation to the whole picture, see rocket reference below, where we copied the 2 boxes of tone, first enclosing a box with as dark a block as our 8b pencils could go, and shading the middle in a slightly lighter tone, then we drew another box next to it, and tried to match exactly the same tone of the interior box to the right.

The object of this exercise, was to train our minds to see exact tonal values, despite the distraction of being compared to a relative tone or colour.

It is easy to make a small area of light and dark in our drawings correct in relation to that small area, but more difficult, but necessary to judge tone's in relation to the whole.

Before we did that, we had a warming up exercise of making different marks by holding the pencil in a different way.

lign: center;"> We chose a bird bath for the drawing exercise today, as it is dark in tone, and high in contrast compared with the snow.

We started by transferring same size measurements from a photocopy to a piece of paper, starting with the top and bottom and only getting into detail when the larger shapes were outlined.

We mad horizontal and vertical measurements, with a vertical center line, and horizontal lines at right angles across the ellipse and base. 

When we had drawn the proportions correctly, we measured the tonal value from our copies with a value grader with holes in it which we made as beginners, ( so homework for begs includes one of these, from as dark black as you can get out of an 8b to a whispy light grey. )

We had the option of drawing from the Church room window over the grave yard, which was partially covered in snow.

The challenge here was to gauge the varying tones of the grave stones against snow, and grass.

Home work for the beginners who couldn't make the 1st class, please try and follow as much of the above class as you can, including the tonal valuation grader ( above ) Hopefully, I can streamline you with the other beginner who came today, and eventually the rest of the class.