Tag: vine charcoal

Reductive Value Drawing

This drawing is a still life reductive value drawing – I was to completely cover the page in vine charcoal and erase from it to form the picture.

I absolutely hated this one because I was highly frustrated getting charcoal everywhere and not being able to have it come out the way I would have like. The most challenged part was going back in and trying to darken and lighten certain areas to make it look like the still life presented in front of me.

Contour Drawing of a Still-Life

A still-life of many objects, including (from left to right) a gourd, a vase, a ball, a smaller gourd in the background, and a large pumpkin that is partially visible on the side of the image.

This drawing highlights the complexity of objects through the use of contour lines, marks, and shadows. The use of contour lines and values is important to differentiate the objects from one another, despite similar coloring on a few of the objects (including the pumpkin and gourd). To create this drawing, I outlined the basic shapes of the still-life with vine charcoal and then proceeded to add some dimension and form to create a 3-D effect. After the object were all correctly placed and shaped, I continued using vine charcoal to add details in the form of contour marks and shadows on and around the objects. The drawing uses elements of basic shapes and forms, as well as contour and value.

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.

Reductive Value Still-Life

A black and white charcoal reductive value drawing of a still life containing a funnel, milk carton, book, and ball.

The drawing shows a funnel, milk carton, book, and small ball resting in front of a draped curtain. To create this drawing, I covered the paper with vine charcoal. Then, I selectively erased to create the forms of the still life and used compressed charcoal and a white conte crayon to emphasize the lights and darks of the still-life. While this project mostly covers value, aspects basic forms and shapes are also present, as well as negative shapes.

Vine Charcoal Drawing

This is a sketch of someone I drew from my Drawing I class. Vine charcoal is the main medium; A circle was the main basic for the skull and an oval for the the flesh of the face.

#art #drawing #vinecharcoal #sketch #draft
Basic Shapes and Form

Sketching this way was particularly difficult in that I usually don’t draw base shapes when starting a new piece.

Still life w/ Value

Process

This is a black,white, and grey drawing of ; a milk carton, a funnel, drapes, and other objects in an effort to practice different values of color.
value shape still life

The process and concepts of this drawing involves gesture drawing and Value shapes. Gesture drawing is drawing quickly multiple times so the average of the drawings equal the shape that I want to make, and value shapes requires using different colors and values from white to black to create the shape instead of relying on lines.
My process was really to focus on one area at a time and make the drawing and go back through again one area at a time and fix any proportion mistakes until I was ok with how it looked.

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