neutral ground still life

Media: Neutral Ground, still life, various kinds of B's pencil. 

Description: 

Neutral Ground Drawing was very new approach and new methods, different from what I usually have done. When I actually learned that Michelangelo’s artworks were using neutral ground, I was surprised. His works were amazing and I always have been impressed by his works because his details. His drawings look real.

When I was doing neutral ground drawing in the class, I get grounded pencil and simply smudge them on the whole sheet of paper. Then, by using a knead-able eraser I had to find the light values of figures first and adding darker values with an ebony pencil. When I began the drawing, I thought about the sizes of still life first and then started thinking about reflected lights at the back of the figures. However, I used a chalk to find the brightest parts of the drawing. I used the darkest value on the pot because it was the closest figure from my position. I also highlighted on a steel chair and a pot. I didn’t use very dark values on paper towel, because its texture is too soft to reflect lights as strong as other figures such as a steel chair. Soft figures usually absorb lights so they don’t really reflect lights—this fact makes me not to make figures to have many dark and light values at one.

I liked neutral ground drawing because it takes much less times than crosshatching which requires me to fill the whole sheet of paper. Instead, I can simply use my palm of hand and smudge. I could make light values easily by erasing, dark values by crosshatching or smudging pencils. I didn’t like it because it was somewhat like pastel drawing which makes the drawing foggy. I thought about contour lines even if the figures didn’t have contour lines. I used an eraser to find contour lines—division between background and the object. White chalk was like sprinkles over the cake. It gives higher quality of the drawing.

Crosshatching Seated Boy

Media: B's, H's pencils, eraser, and seated boy drawing

Description: 

I drew a contour line first and started shading with 2B. I started crosshatching. I crossed lines over to create dark values. 2Bs were not very effective for dark values such as armpit, so I used 4Bs. Extreme dark values were created by 8B. It was very soft. Under the butt was really dark so that I could not even tell what was under there, whether it is blanket or something else. I figured that extremely dark values have light value right next to it, and they contrast. Even if there is shadow, there is reflecting light. There was brightest light around his face. The boy seems like facing the light which makes shadow driven over him. Contour line didn’t exist there but it was distinguishable because dark and light value changes. The purpose of this assignment was to understand, create the dark and light values by using crosshatching

Contour/Texture-American Football

Media: Ebony or B's pencils, different kinds of textures, and eraser 
Description: 

We were told to set a composition of the picture from the magazines. We had to include two people and should not choose a drawing or a cartoon. The original was two boys playing American Football and one boy was attacking another. Two of boys seem to be Junior High School students. Their bodies weren’t muscular but feminine.

Drawing wasn’t that hard but choosing textures for boys were hard. First of all, I started with number on the players’ uniforms. I chose a matt because it has regular bumps which give a square pattern. I also tried to make it a three-dimensional look by pressing some parts harder. I chose a straw hat for a boy’s helmet. The straw hat has rounded pattern which also could help illustrating roundness of the helmet. I overlapped some parts to give a three-dimensional look. I chose a leather chair for skins, speaker for the player’s shirt, tiles for some part of the shirt, air-conditioner’s stripes for the sock, and vertical lines for the background which could possibly help two figures separate from the background.

When I was selecting textures for my assignment, I thoroughly thought about each figure’s real texture—Rough surface for rough texture, soft surface for soft texture, and so on.