Still Life

This is a 40 minute still life study drawn using a white pencil on black paper. I chose to draw using white pencil as I wanted to practise drawing using reverse values. I chose an small selection of differently shaped round objects, and arranged them so none of them were "kissing". The objects I chose allowed me to practise rendering light on rounded things, I think I successfully managed to do this as my illustration has a three-dimensional quality to it as a result of the shading. I feel that this was most successful with the handle of the mug inside the bowl and the shadow it casts.

I found it challenging to produce a range of values using a white pencil as it's lead was quite hard. I found that the most effective way of creating lighter tones was to shade using layers of pencil. I could have used cross-hatching to do this more effectively but I wanted to keep my lines all following the same/a similar direction to give the image a more fluid feel as a whole.

Landscape

This is a 15 minute landscape study of the view from my front window, drawn using charcoal. My charcoal work isn't as effective as my pencil studies; I find that it is too soft, which makes it hard to maintain lighter values in the image as they get ruined by the charcoal smudging itself across the page. This makes the image flat and dull. I think the most effective part of the image is the right side where the charcoal hasn't been smudged and the detail of the tree and the surrounding bushes are more contrasty.