seeing SPACE and SHADOWS (with a pencil)

1. Define space on your page with only black and white (light and dark) by making hatch marks with your pencil.
Do NOT worry about accurate shapes of the individual objects. The point is to create an impression of space using light and dark.
you are encouraged to make more pencil marks than you think you should make.



2. Take a moment to rough out the shapes of BOTH the foreground and background.
GENERALIZE the shapes geomentrically. This should only take a couple of minutes. Any longer and you are getting too much detail for this particular exercise.
Ultimately, the emphasis is on creating SPACE and developing detailed SHADOWS.



3. Continue working the shadows, darker and darker by making overlapping, or crossing hatch marks (called "cross-hatching").
Don't worry about preserving highlights.
You should have hatch marks on 95% of the page (or more).
Note how hatch marks roughly follow the direction of edges and help define shape.



4. Darker and darker and darker.
How much information can you find within the shadows?
How many steps of dark gray and black are there?

Use your eraser to "pull" out the highlights.
(there should be VERY FEW areas of paper white)
Use the point of your pencil to make the darkest areas as dark as you can.






*** a note on this drawing....
it could easily be MUCH darker and have been worked for much longer, with more cross hatching; refining the shadows further, and being very careful about the placement and direction of lines that make up the hatch marks.
Each artist must decide how much:

CONTRAST

LINE QUALITY

DETAIL