My journey through the drawing course at the Open College of the Arts

The task was to draw two objects with reflective surfaces with charcoal on a large sheet, including the reflections of shadow and light on the surface, and using putty rubber to work out hightlights.

I selected two metal cooking pots for this drawing. I chose large ones, to have more surface on which to observe reflections, and also because I thought it would be better for filling the relatively large A2 sheet. I began with soft charcoal sticks to outline my objects and some of their detail. I did this with soft, short strokes – in my typical way of searching the forms, rather than drawing confident lines. When I wanted to sketch darker areas, I realized that the sticks were too thin to be put on the side, and I switched to a piece of pressed charcoal block.

I had many difficulties with the pressed charcoal. Sometimes it would make deep dark marks, at other times the marks were medium grey at most. The charcoal seems to be unevenly pressed, with some areas soft and others hard. Also I was working rather fast and almost never knew where the tip of the block was, so the lines that I drew only rarely matched the lines I saw and wanted to draw. I wasn’t very satisfied with what I’ve drawn. The coloured areas were too bold because of the rude marks and hatchings. Finally, bringing out highligths with putty rubber didn’t work, it rather smudged the charcoal and the tip wasn’t fine enough to make tiny highlights.

Overall, I found this task difficult. I might have done better if I had attempted only a detail of one pot, like a side with a section of the rim and a handle. Also, I should get more practice with charcoal. I liked this medium a lot in the free mark-making exercises, but here I found it very difficult to control. Especially, how would I make dark areas that are not dominated by my irregular mark making.

The drawing is rather raw, probably typical for charcoal. The reflective surfaces come out better when the drawing is looked at from a distance of three or four meters. Then the strokes from my marks disappear, and the actual pattern of dark and light areas comes to the fore.

The task was to select two or three objects with a shiny surface, place a light source at one side and then draw the objects with the patterns of shadow and reflected light.

Page 1: B/W pencil drawing of two objects

It took me quite long to decide on the objects for this drawing. I tried some porcelain mugs, but they were so shiny and reflective and it was almost impossible for me to distinguish object reflections from reflected that I thought they’d be too difficult for this task. Finally I selected a clay pitcher and a clay plant pot, which both had shiny surfaces but these were not extremely reflexive.

The drawing began timidly as ever, with very light searching lines and minimal shadings. I wasn’t very satisfied and continued to work, trying to bring out more tones and achieve a broader array of tones from light to dark. I found it quite difficult to distinguish the main shadow pattern from tonality resulting from reflected light. But after some time there was a moment when I felt like I had stepped over an inner limit, from then on I could work more freely and applied more pressure on the pencil, resulting in darker tones and more contrasts.

I also became less concerned with getting details right and began to see larger patterns of shaded areas. I used a freestyle hatching technique which I find a bit too rough for the smooth surfaces, the hatching marks are sometimes too bold. But overall I feel I’ve made a step forward with this drawing, maybe beginning to overcome fears to spoil a drawing by making “false” marks.

Page 2: Coloured pastel drawing

I wanted to try out the same arrangement on mid-tone paper, to work out light and dark areas with black and white pastels. When looking through my drawing materials, I found pressed pastel blocks in brown tones, and decided to try whether I could draw the tonality of my clay objects in colour.

I’m very new to pastel and decided to give it a go without further preparation, in the hope of ‘learning by doing’. I found it rather difficult to depict the dark and light areas  – the different brown tones of my pastel sticks did not blend very well, and rather than having gradations of darkness, I had a mixture of various brown tones. I began to apply the pastels more densely, which improved the colouring, but I was not satisfied. Finally I smudged the colours to create a more even surface. This worked rather well. I stopped at that point.

My initial idea to use the paper’s colour as mid tone wasn’t at all achieved, instead it has been a learning experience in pastel colouring. Maybe I’ll give it another try using only black and white pastels on grey paper. Leaving out colours should help to focus on gradations of tonality and the shading pattern.