Drawing fundamentals: tasks of the month
Hatching, a value scale, a sphere and a cylinder. Sessions after which it’s clear how construction differs from tracing an outline.
Tasks
4–10 January
Sphere, cube and cylinder on one sheet
Put three objects of simple shape on the table — something round, something faceted and something elongated — and light them with a single lamp from the side. Draw all three on one sheet. Watch the border between light and shadow: on the sphere it is soft and travels around the form, on the cube it is sharp and follows the edge. If the border is the same on all three, the form doesn’t read. Any medium. Post your piece to the feed; the review is on the Sunday live stream.
11–17 January
Hatching: five values without smudging
Divide the sheet into five bands and build the value in them from the lightest to the darkest — with hatching only, no blending with a finger and no eraser. Value is built up not with pressure but with the number of layers: lay the hatching in even passes, each one at an angle to the one before. The main mistake is leaning on the pencil to "get it black faster": the paper clogs up and the value goes no further. Then hatch any object from your table the same way.
18–24 January
Drapery: three folds
Throw a piece of fabric over the back of a chair and pick a section with three large folds. Draw only those — not the whole cloth. Start with the direction: a fold is a form, it has a top, a side and a bottom, like a cylinder. First find which way it is turned, and only then lay in the value. A small sheet, an hour to an hour and a half.
25–31 January
A still life of three objects
Put together a setup of three objects of different shape and height. Place them so that they overlap — that gives you depth straight away. First lay out the whole mass on the sheet, then look for the proportions inside it, and only at the end the value. A common mistake: starting with one object in detail and then fitting the others in around it. Any medium, from pencil to tablet.