You know I've seen a lot of work from my oldest son (who's also pretty good with a pencil) but he does the same thing. What shading there is just doesn't provide the degree of contrast that's required. I suspect part of that is because you used a propelling pencil. They're great for simple sketches and engineering plans, but your walking boots picture is probably about as far as you can take it.
Many years back (not long after I left university) I took a night school art course and I learnt two really important things.
- Using the right tools for the job.
- The absolute importance of shading.
Using the right tools just means having an array of pencils HB to 6B (and a pencil sharpener always at hand for those really soft ones). You start off with the hard to get pale planning lines, and then build the shade as you add detail. Too often I think we get wrapped in re-creating the detail (that our brains tell us is there) and not consider it might be partially obscured or too dark to see clearly anyway.
Now let's consider shading. At first look we assume it just gives us contrast, turning an outline into an illusion of 3D shapes. But it does more than that,.. let's look at these two (almost identical) spanners.
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| Two (almost) identical spanners |
So while I like your drawing of your boots, and I understand your desire to keep it uncluttered, I have no idea whether you're feet are in the air or dangling off a cliff. The grass doesn't give enough context for the brain to decide. The shading under the heel needs extending back up the legs before we're comfortable.
The second common mistake is just not being bold with the shading. I always feel like I'm over-compensate when I'm adding shading, really getting that darkness onto the page. But consider what it takes to compose a good black and white photo,.. it certainly isn't just turning the saturation down. There are various video tutorials that show how the experts do this, and I think it's highly worth watching one if you want to really understand how to make black and white work.
Finally once you make the leap into deeper contrast you'll find you have one final problem,.. it smudges too easily. You can get proper fixer from an art supplier, or you could just do what my night school teacher suggested and spray it with hair spray..... worked for me, and smells nice too :-)
You're so right that I'm afraid to use dark shading. So that picture really looks unfinished next to one by someone more experienced.
ReplyDeleteA book I've just bought uses a scraperboard as an exercise (where you start with the black and reveal the light) this could be a very good thing to try.
And yes, I can see exactly what you mean about shading adding context, that example really makes the point.
But my question was really, is it right to learn these things and make sketches that look like everyone else's, or to find a style that I like. If you say 'yes of course it's important to use hatching shading to create shape and set a context', one of my heroes is Aubrey Beardsley. He sometimes puts objects in the foreground / background to create some perspective, occasionally a lot of detail, but there's no shading at all, everything is a line or black or white. (Sometimes you get 'faux' halftones where he draws a lot of detail in an area).
Maybe it's important to learn the rules before breaking them?
I do have a good selection of different pencils, and a special 'tool roll' for them. (I looooove buying art materials!) I did many of the exercises for the Craftsy course using the different pencils (starting light, moving to hard). But the course moved on to pen and hatching, and I think this appealed to me and even with pencil I found I preferred just using the same pencil throughout.
ReplyDeleteScraperboard is good fun but it's different way about, very much like the drawings I've been doing on the boogieboard. You really have to plan ahead before you remove the black because once it's gone, it's gone.
ReplyDeleteWhen I drew the snow-dog I made a mistake and scribbled his left eye out. It looked rubbish without both, so the only thing I could do was press the erase button and start over. That raises two points, 1) take your time, 2) if you aren't happy, ditch it and start again.
As for your question about Aubrey Beardsley, well do you think he understood shading, or chose to avoid using it? From the examples I've seen they don't lack for black. It's almost like extreme contrast rather than empty line pictures. Like an exercise in what can be discarded while retaining the essence of the original image.
Interesting question (I've had to delve into books). Very early drawings use shading. But these are considered "not very good" and he found fame and work when he developed his 'extreme contrast' style. (Good way to put it.) They don't lack black, mostly they probably contain as much black as white (a few are very black, a few very white) but large areas may be just black or just white. Very brave compositions that really work.
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