Today I finished up week two of my Drawing Fundamentals class. Although I’ve been drawing since childhood, I still feel that I have a lot to learn. This weeks assignment was to watch a few videos on cross hatching, stippling and shading as well as draw a still life from four angles. Below is my completed still life sketches. (Total duration to complete all four drawings ~45 mins.)
This exercise helped me loosen up a bit and get more comfortable with sketching again. I tried drawing more with my arm instead of just my wrist, which allowed me to draw more loosely.
The biggest challenge for me in this assignment was proportion. The carton object in my still life provided the biggest challenge, it was too tall for the small quadrants on my sketchbook page so it kept getting cropped out of each composition. The lighting I had was also challenging, because there were two competing light sources – the ambient light from the window and the light from the lamp to my back right.
This exercise would be great for any artist who wants to loosen up their sketching style and practice shading forms of different shapes and sizes.
Miranda Estep 