Activity

Fantastic Peta! Beautiful toning even on what looks like textured paper! Great range of tones and highlights which is achieving wonderful form! Great attention to the details!!!

Thank you Doug. I have just ordered some hot press paper in the hope it will be easier. I started the course before I actually had the right equipment, so am making do with what was lying around. 🙂

Wonderful attention to detail on these branches while maintaining 3 dimensional form. And, lovely shimmery highlights – hard to do, and really well done.

Beauties!

Thank you for the beginner tutorials, I’m really enjoying them. Do you think it matters what type of graphite pencil you use for these shading activities? I’m using an H pencil, but there’s nothing special about it… just wondering if better (and more expensive) graphite pencils are worth purchasing.

Great toning exercises Peta! Beautiful transitions!!! You have mastered toning!!! I am surprised you can achieve the darks with an H pencil! I don’t know how hard it was for you, but a HB or B graphite pencil would get you the darks easier and quicker. After using several different brands I prefer the Faber-Castelle graphite pencils. The same b…[Read more]

Thank you for your feedback Doug. I made a mistake, it’s an F pencil. And I might have cheated and brought in a B for the right hand side of the branch at the end there. 🙂 Thanks for letting me know the pencils you use. I’ll look out for a set of Faber-castelle ones.

Your toning is just beautiful. Keep up the great work!

It’s also helpful and fun to practice the toning with just the Dark Sepia Polychromos pencil. It’s so soft and smooth on the hot press smooth paper. And as you progress, you’ll be toning with different Polychromos pencils. These look great!!! Look at that glow in the brown range one. 🙂

These look good Linda! I would work a little more on the range of tones. There is too much of a jump from the darkest area on the right edge to the tone to the left of it. There should not be any stripes of tone – one tone should smoothly transition to the next tone. Same with the highlight. It is too much of a stripe which means the tones…[Read more]

This looks great Linda!!! A couple of areas I would revisit. As I mentioned on your cylinder post, the highlight is too much of a stripe and the areas flanking it should be lightened. There is not enough range of tones in the area too the right of the highlight as it moves toward the shadowed side of the branch. Actually the top of the branch…[Read more]

Hi Linda- your tone bar looks good! 7, 8 and 9 look a little close in tone, but there is a glare on a couple of them and that might be the reason I think that.

Doug, thank you for the feedback. The glare did not help but definitely 8 and 9 are too close. Lol 7 too. I have never drawn before so the concepts are new to me. I will practice practice practice.

Doug. Thank you so much for the comments.

Doug, thank you so much! I see what you are saying. About the branch and the cylinder. Lol. I was thrilled it looks like a branch!

You are starting to get good form on your sphere Linda! There is also good transition of tones! The lighter area looks very similar in tone and part of the problem is I don’t see a true highlight. Establishing a highlight and making sure you have a nice, light transition away from it will help a lot! Reflected highlights are really tricky!!! Y…[Read more]

Thank you Doug. I knew the reflective highlight was wrong. It made the sphere look like a Whoopie Pie. Thank you for all of the encouragement. This is such a nice positive group.

Bonus because it’s fun to think of Whoopie pies. 🙂

Branch portraits are the best portraits. 🙂 I hope to host a show of just twig drawings one day.

Keep up the good work, Linda. In art school BFA I think we had to draw about 10,000 tone bars.

🙂

How fun! You could call it a Stick Up!