Trying shapes with different types of edges.

Another attempt at L1, this time with a teddy bear. I’ve gotten more used to digital painting in the meantime and tried to avoid using airbrushes/smudge tools too much. The geometry of the bear is relatively simple, but I had a hard time determining where the light would hit from imagination, especially near the indents at the eyes. So I simplified it into planes (which was a whole lot of trouble on its own), but it seems to help. I still had to meticulously determine the terminator/where each plane was facing, and at what angle it would meet with the light source. Hopefully doing that becomes more intuitive with practice. Is there a method to find the terminator of a 3d form more efficiently? Another thing I had trouble with was the subtleties within the light zone; the little value shifts caused by subtle plane changes. While I was (somewhat) able to separate the lights and darks, I found it very difficult to put more detail into the lights, so currently the light side is almost a single flat value. It’s still confusing how I can make a drawing seem like it’s popping out towards the viewer.

This was a good project to apply everything we’ve learned during past lessons. Though, actually executing different edges (especially very soft ones) was very difficult digitally. I’ve never learned to paint digitally, and since Stan approaches the project traditionally, I didn’t really know how to approach it. I used soft airbrushes/erasers and blending tools to create soft edges. Soft edges made with other brushes that aren’t inherently soft didn’t create the illusion of 3d form. I may have been overly focused on perfectly soft gradations, rather than other painting techniques that can describe soft edges without that airbrush feel. I think I’ll need to do more research on digital painting to become more comfortable with making soft edges.

Another fun one

The project is pretty tough cause i try to get my blending with graphite pencil abit more smoother but it still comes out abit more spotty.

Soft edges are really hard 😉

Wow Which pencil do you use?

my attempt

I first drew and shaded random blob shapes I came up with. I later followed along with the demo and did two of those blobs. In following along with the demo, I see where I could have done my first blobs differently.

Some first attempts, but I really didn't do a great job with the spaceship !

heres some more, the larger shapes i did this morning and the smaller ones i did just now

Here's my submission, not feeling quite happy with these, i think i did the middle one the best though. I could push my values harder i think, but most of all i need more practice with edges in general and making them transition much more cleanly. On the one of the right, the top bit is supposed to be a cylinder form, which goes down into a boxier sort of bloated for that has a hard turn at the bottom, but the cylinder part really doesn't feel right with it's shading, and the mass of the boxy form doesn't either. I'll probably be revisiting the shading a sphere after this, and continuing to do this as a warm up for a few days until i can work up to something i like

I started with a graphite pencil on newspaper, but that was kinda hard and took quite long, so I switched to charcoal pencil. Not something I've done very often and I stained quite a lot! I also found that imagining where the adges / shade parts must be can be difficult when it is not obvious or when something is in front of it with a cast shadow. I'm thinking that I want to do this assignment later in a bit smaller scale, because I feel there is a lot to learn while doing it.

I tried to do one without the blending stump just so I would get a feel. As usual, I just need to do a lot more of this.

Happy with how this turned out. I was kind of aiming for those western desert sunset vibes. I need to remember to use darker pencils next time around, because I feel like the image lacks contrast. I just used a single B to shade the whole drawing.

A bunch of blobs + the snail from earlier in the course and a blob-bug