Drawing 1: Week 2

The second week of the drawing class focused on creating shadows and shading. In class we had to draw balls and boxes with proper shading and shadows with either charcoal or pencil (I chose charcoal!). There was a large platform in the middle of the room, covered with a white cloth, that had various sized boxes and balls arranged on it. This set up is what we had to use to draw our still life of simple objects.

First, we had to sketch thumbnails from different angles until we found a set up we wanted to draw. Here are my thumbnails: 

I did more thumbnails that I needed to. I couldn't figure out how I wanted the items arranged in my drawing.

I finally decided to draw an area that had three balls which almost made a straight line. The light was shining pretty much directly down on the objects, so there wasn't much shadow. This took me a few hours to draw:

I gave up on the in-class drawing when I couldn't think of any way to alter or improve it.

The homework assignment for the week was to create a still life drawing of three or five objects. I spent almost an hour creating a set up of objects I liked. Here are my thumbnail drawings:

The first set up was of three glass jars filled with either candy or sugar. While making the first thumbnail, I realized that candy inside of a glass jar is a very difficult thing to draw. This made me change the set up and started a search for simple objects. I finally decided on a small glass jar full of sugar, a tiny potted plant that I'm growing, and a spool of thread. 

The drawing took me three nights to complete. I had to draw at night to get the shadows how I wanted them! Kat was very helpful during the day:

That is, she was helpful until she decided to knock over the plant and thread while I was gone one day. She fortunately did that after I was finished with everything except shading the background.

Since I decided to set things up on the coffee table, I had to sit on the floor by the couch to get a nice angle. Here is another view of my set up:

The towel is on the floor because I was using charcoal to draw. Charcoal is very dusty and I didn't want to get that in the light colored carpet. That would be an awful thing.

Here is the final version of my drawing. Somehow the corner got bent. I might have to blame Kat for that...

And that concludes week two of my adventures in drawing. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to take better pictures...

Edit: I was told to make the background dark. Looking at this picture, I need to figure out how to make it even darker! And to take non-fuzzy pictures. New camera is needed, I guess :(