Author: Trinity Taylor

My First Reductive Value Drawing

Everything in this image was white, but the image itself is a reductive value drawing completed with vine charcoal. The objects in the still life sat on boxes covered in white sheets background. Beginning from the left, there is a styrofoam sphere that peeks out from the left side of the page slightly behind it and to the right stands a bare, white paper towel roll. A can to the right of the paper towel roll casts a dark shadow on the styrofoam ball. All three objects sit on a ledge draped in a sheet, which wrinkles up slightly as gravity pulls it toward the bottom of the page. The ledge covered in the drape takes up the bottom left quarter of the page. Slightly behind and to the right of the can is a skull, facing the left side. The end of a bone can be seen peeking out next the skull, slightly in front of a black wine bottle. The bone, shifted a bit off of the second ledge casts a small, dark shadow on the drape below. Underneath these objects and next to the first drape there is a slab of rock, like worn marble with a design engraved in it, although the engraving cannot be seen, only the faint shadows cast from it onto the marble. The corner of a box pokes out from behind the slab, the side nearest the viewer covered in a dark shadow. At the very bottom of the page, at the edge of the first ledge, lies a small hermit crab shell.

To draw this still life, I first covered my page in vine charcoal, then began drawing in any shapes I saw in a darker tone than the background.

Afterward, I used a kneaded eraser to lighten parts of the drawing with a lighter value, add highlights, and blend. I used the vine charcoal to darken spots with darker values create shadows. At first, the local values of all the objects were blending together, but after emphasizing a few parts of the drawing, most of the objects became distinct. Occasionally, I saw the need to use compressed charcoal to bring out darker parts of the still life where the vine charcoal wasn’t doing the job.

“Bottles” Value Still Life

The objects in this drawing were all different colors and had different degrees of sheen, all sitting on a white table cloth. From the left, half of a matte white wine bottle can be seen with a small styrofoam ball sitting at the bottom right corner of the bottle. The ball casts a slightly longer, dark shadow onto the table cloth to the right. Behind the shadow is a glass bottle about the same height of the wine bottle. It casts a somewhat transparent shadow to its right that just begins to touch the base of a dark bocce ball. The objects in front of the bocce ball cast shadows on its left side, although there is still a cast shadow extending from the base of the ball to the left. A small, cylindrical shiny metal container and cone shaped lid rest between the glass bottle and the bocce ball. There is a small looped handle on top of the lid. The edge nearly touches the shadow cast from the small styrofoam ball on the left of the page. The container casts its own shadow to the right. Behind the bocce ball sits a white milk carton, the shape of a rectangular prism. The glass bottle casts a shadow on the left side of the carton that looks like hardly anything more than an outline. A decorative, cylindrical vase is placed behind both the carton and the bottle. It's left side is bright while it's right side is dark, with a gradient of shadow in between. Indents on the vase have their own shadows and highlights. The base of the cylinder becomes like a curved stand, and the vase curves inward before curving back out again with the base extending behind the glass bottle and the milk carton. Part of the base of the vase can be seen as a refracted image in the bottle. In the background, there are a few white desks with black table rims and legs, along with a grey chair.

I used vine charcoal to draw this picture and started by creating margins on my paper and marking the halfway and quarter way points along the edges. I used these marks to match up my drawing with what I saw using my viewfinder.

I began by mapping out and correcting the general shapes and positions of the objects with several gesture drawings, then I filled in the values of the positive space before moving on to the negative space and background.

It took me a while to draw this picture, although there are still details I missed; for example, the glass bottles had ridges on the top just below the neck that refracted the background image in interesting ways. Given more time, I would include more details like this.

Lunchbox Contours and Cross Hatching

I drew the same object three different times in this picture. In the top left corner of the page is a contour drawing of my lunch box, to the right of that is a cross contour, and under both is a cross hatching. The lunchbox itself is divided into two rectangular prisms, both the same width but one with a shorter height than the first. The lunchbox is lying at an angle in the drawings with its black handle pointing down and to the left. In the contour drawing, one can see the designs on top of the lunchbox, including a darkened curve on the left side of the top prism. A zipper lines the top of the prism underneath. Crinkles can be seen all along the lunchbox in the form of shadows. In the cross contour, these crinkles are seen as three dimensional waves in a two dimensional grid; however one notices that the bottom prism is mostly flat on each face. In the cross hatching, these waves are still visible, but appear more like shadows on the lunchbox. Nothing on this drawing was colored in based on local values.

These three pictures of my lunchbox are some of the best contours and cross hatching I’ve done for class so far.

For the contour drawing in the top left corner, I began by drawing the lunchbox without lifting my pencil. I don’t remember using any under drawings for this one. For the other two, however, I believe I did begin by drawing two rectangular prisms stacked on top of one another.

The cross contour drawing was the most difficult for me because it was hard to visualize the dips and rises in the fabric on a grid. If I were to draw this over again, I might spend a bit more time on the cross contour to make sure I have the topography correct.

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