Drawing - line, tone, and stipple- page 50

Line drawing in fibre tip pen

Pine cone

This continuous line drawing was done in fibre tip pen. I found it difficult to not lift the pen from the paper and managed with two lifts. The fibre tip bleeds even on card so there were some 'blobs'. When I finished this I couldn't resist some lines and shading. I found the felt tip allowed broad bigger strokes but found it difficult to vary the width of the line. Also I found it difficult to draw larger than sight size but overall was not too displeased with this effort. 

Tone/depth detail - Shell

 

 

This took me two hours to complete and I used a range of pencils H, B, 2B and 4B.

I tried to make the 'bumps' on the shell a focal point and constantly returned to it to darken the shadows. Also I strengthened the front edge line as being a shell I thought the hard edge would work.

 

 

 

Stipples - cauliflower

 

 



 

 

 

For this drawing I used a Zig pen 0.3 size. Having trialled this in my sketch book I realised that it can be easy to 'get lost' in the stipples and to forget where the darker and therefore denser areas of stipples should go. This drawing took two hours .

 

The felt tips were easy to use to achieve a wide line but not east to control; the fine line pen is ideal to create fine dots without smudging and graphite pencils lend themselves to hatching and smudging and are versatile medium.

 

I enjoyed all three of these drawings; however stippling can be very time consuming.

I don't feel ready to admit a preference of detail over broader work or vice versa. Detail at time seems challenging and possibly more interesting. However I think that achieving broad strokes to achieve energy in a work probably relies upon a good working knowledge of how to achieve detail.

 

Composition.

I'm not sure how the composition of these could have been improved as the instructions on how to go about them were fairly rigid. Size seems to be a constant motive in the instructions and perhaps, for example the shell could have been done with less white space and I suppose the cauliflower could have been larger too. However with the latter I tried to obtain a good viewpoint by angling the vegetable slightly in order to make it look 3D.

 

Finally the problems I had with the felt tip made it difficult for me to concentrate on space as much as I would have liked. I redid this drawing several times in order to learn how to overcome this but decided that the medium was not the best for this task.