Light and shade, volume

The order of work changes. You start a drawing not from the contour but from the boundary of light and shadow: first the core shadow is laid in, then the form shadow with its reflected light and the cast shadow, and only then the halftones inside the lit part. You pick up the habit of squinting at the work and reducing it to four or five steps of value. And one more, more useful still: let nothing into the light that is darker than the lightest place in the shadow.

Value drawing almost always breaks in the same place. The light is over-darkened, the shadow is lightened, the boundary between them dissolves, and the form stops reading no matter how much hatching goes on top. Then people try to save it with a contour and pressure along the edges, which makes the object look cut out of paper. The half-hour lesson on hatching and light-and-shade modeling covers a scheme that keeps the zones apart, and on the sphere and the cylinder from week two of the marathon the mistake is caught fastest: on a simple form you see at once where the value went wrong.

The first thing to watch is that very lesson, “On hatching and light-and-shade modeling” — thirty-five minutes, and it sets the vocabulary that all the other recordings use. Then week one of “Value and Rendering” with hatching and value scales, then simple objects. The still life with several objects runs over two classes in a row, and that is normal: that is where the hardest thing is taken apart, how to tie several volumes together without losing the overall value structure. The timelapse with the archer in value is better left until later, fifteen to twenty-five hours of work are compressed into five minutes there.

What the section does not have is linear perspective. Vanishing points, constructing a cube and interior perspective are not part of it: value is worked out here on form that has already been set up. Foreshortening and the perspective of the figure sit in the neighboring section on figure and anatomy. Reviews run in the general flow of the streams; the section does not give a personal review of every piece.