Rose using stippling

In this exercise, the aim was to draw using just a black pen, but to create tone and shade using stippling.

I have to admit I wasn't quite sure about the stippling technique, and was initially unhappy with the effect - the dots looked a bit odd and just like a lot of dots. But then I tried to doing the dots rather more quickly, and found it easier to create the types of effects I was looking for, getting a denser concentration of dots.

However, I still resorted to hatching in some parts of the picture where I was looking for a lighter shade.

Exercise: pencil drawing of clam shell

I put this clamshell under a bright anglepoise lamp located above and slightly to the right of the shell.

I rested the shell on the spine of a book to raise it and to create some shadows.

The drawing is considerably larger than the shell itself, so the A3 sheet was quite difficult to manage. I worked initally with an HB pencil to get the general proportions and then worked it up with softer pencils, including 6B to get the darker tones.

I used a putty rubber to pick out some of the bright highlighted parts.

Line drawing: Green pepper

I have to admit I set up the outline for this with an HB pencil in order ot ensure I had the rough dimensions, and then added the black outline.
After spending so much time in earlier exercises on shading and tone, it felt hard to stick just to an outline. For example, the centre of the hollow green pepper was really dark, and so it was hard not to fill that in with black.

Exploring coloured media - first steps

In many ways, it's quite a relief to start using colour after spending so many months with mainly pencils.
The biggest discovery has been oil pastels. I bought a big box of these with a good range of colours, and I've enjoyed using a much looser style and more extravagant strokes which they seem to demand.
It's also great that you can smooth them out and merge them with your fingers, and also scratch away the surfae with a nib to get thin white stripes in the surface. It's very liberating.

Exercise 1 - this involved drawing a tube with red at one end and blue at the other with the colours merging in the middle, using a mix of stippling and hatching/crosshatching. Although I didn't see the point of stippling at first, I can now see it achieves some nice effects (good for depicting shimmering water, for example).

I tried the exercise with oil pastels, coloured inks (using a bamboo dip-pen), coloured pencils, pastel pencils, soft pastels (very messy and not very successful for this this exercise), and watercolour pencils (these really came into their own with the application of a wet brush - the colours were bright and the effect is smooth and limpid).

Here's the first flourish with oil pastels:

 And here are the others:

Wallace Collection visit - and a splodge of white

One of my favourite galleries in London - on one of the least well known - is the Wallace Collection just north of Oxford Street.
This is a permanent collection that incorporates some great paintings from the likes of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Reubens and Titian, plus suits of armour and sculptures and ceramics from medieval times.
But the core of the collection is French, much if it dating from the days of Louis XIV, XV and XVI and Marie Antoinette, and bought in auctions that followed the French Revolution of 1789. This includes some furniture, porcelain, and a lot of paintings from the likes of Fragonard, Watteau and Boucher.
But the picture that drew my attention this time was quite a large portrait (which I think was by John Singer Sargent) of a man standing with his sword by his side. The gleaming steel of the sword's handle was really effective and realistic, so I approached the canvas to see how the effect had been achieved. Close up, the handle was merely some grey paint, topped with a splodge of white paint, and three thinner white stripes that looked as if they had been applied quite hastily.
And yet, stepping back again, the fabulous effect was restored.
The lesson for me (although I'm just on drawing at the moment) is to keep the "big picture" in mind and not get too caught up with reproducing every minute detail; a few strokes of a pencil or brush can be very effective in creating an illusion.