Drawing Class

Botanical Drawing II began this week. I have a different instructor than I did for BDI and I think I am really going to enjoy this. It is funny how different people feel about their art supplies. The first instructor didn't like any pencil softer than HB and hated tortillons. This instructor told us to grab that 6B and make it darker and tossed out tortillons to the entire class.
He gave us this basketweave exercise to practice blending and to see how the various pencils differed. On the vertical pieces I justed used my pencil for shading. On the horizontal pieces I used a tortillon. Using the tortillon was much faster but I lost the texture that you get with just pencil. I personnally like the texture. On the scan the it doesn't look as well blended as it does on the actual paper (especially the 6B)


Another exercise that he gave us was to roll a strip of paper about an inch wide by 4-5 inches long around a pencil and then tape it down in a spiral. This is how it came out. This was started in class and finished at home so the lighting changed dramatically so in trying to continue where I left off in class had to visualize to a certain extent different lighting. I still have a hard time with "imagined" light sources (this makes doing anything from memory difficult as I end up with crazy light from everywhere). Hopefully that will improve as I have more practice with real light sources. With both of these I had some problems with the brightest spots but with practice hopefully that will get easier.