Category: OCAD STUDIO – CLASSICAL DRAWING AND PAINTING LESSONS
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Once the wash drawing is dry, you can add all the basic colours and start to develop a sense of form.
From this stage onwards you can use all the colours – try to pay attention to the particular mixtures you use as it will help in later stages if you can roughly remember what you used to mix up all the different colours.
You will need to add a little oil to your mineral spirits this time (and in future sessions you will need to use more oil each time).
Start with the background as this will likely be quite a flat and neutral colour.
If the ground plane and background plane are different you will need to mix up two different colours.
Look for a slight gradient in the ground plane (ideally lighter at the front and darker at the back). As this will start to impart a sense of depth.
You can lighten the paint on the canvas by mixing up a lighter colour and blending it straight into the wet paint.
Make the edge between the shadow on the ground and the general ground colour slightly soft (we don’t want any hard edges at this stage).
Once the background is in – you mix up a colour for the fruit in shadow.
This may take some trial and error as you want the shadow to be the same value (darkness) and colour as your subject. Experiment with different mixtures until the colour looks good.
You will have an opportunity to make adjustments with glazes later on so it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Once the fruit in shadow is done, follow the same process for the fruit in light.
Mix up some slightly darker tones to begin developing the halftones where the fruit colour turns from the shadow to the light. This will make the lemon appear more 3D.
You can also use a blender brush (a clean brush) to soften all the edges of the lemon. This will help make the form of the lemon more round and it will also get rid of any hard edges that would show through the later layers that are thinner and more transparent.
Once everything is roughly blocked in, you will need to leave the painting until it is touch dry before continuing onto the next stage.
Course Materials:
Small Canvas (stretched or board)
Easel
Palette
Palette Cups
Oil Paints
Titanium White
Cadmium Yellow (or equivalent bright yellow)
Burnt Umber
Raw Umber
Prussian Blue
Ivory Black
Various brushes (ideally a range of smaller and larger brushes, but whatever you have lying around will be fine)
Set up your chosen fruit with a single direct light source (this could be a window or a bright spotlight) against a simple background.
For this stage, the only paint you will need to use is burnt umber (as well as the other materials and equipment listed below).
Use a medium sized flat brush to apply scrubby lines of burnt umber mixed with odourless mineral spirits. Avoid getting too much paint on the brush as we want to keep it light to start with.
Start with the simple proportions, such as the outside widths of the fruit and the ground line of the background.
Keep your lines straight so that they are easy to correct.
Once you sketched in the shapes of the shadows and background, you can lightly fill them in using the same scrubby hatching strokes.
This is a good time to make any corrections to the shapes that may become apparent.
When you’re happy with the general proportions of the shapes you can mix up some more paint and odourless mineral spirits and start using broader brush strokes to lay in darker tones.
Keep in mind the difference between the shadow on the fruit and the shadow cast by the fruit on the ground.
Finally, once you’ve darkened all the tones sufficiently, you can use a smaller brush to add some detail to the edges of these shapes, in preparation for next week.
Leave the painting until touch dry (usually 2-3 days)
Course Materials:
Small Canvas (stretched or board)
Easel
Palette
Palette Cups
Oil Paints
Titanium White
Cadmium Yellow (or equivalent bright yellow)
Burnt Umber
Raw Umber
Prussian Blue
Ivory Black
Various brushes (ideally a range of smaller and larger brushes, but whatever you have lying around will be fine)
Adding the final details in the foreground using pencil:
You can use the pencil in this stage in a very similar fashion to Part 6, starting with the shadows in the foreground elements and smoothing the tones out where necessary.
Once the shadows are complete, use the pencil to work carefully over the painted white areas, adding tonal shifts from the shadows into the lights in order to develop a better sense of 3D forms in these sections
You can also use the fine point of the pencil to add very fine details (such as the writing on the letter in this piece).
Make sure that you don’t go too dark with these elements as the image will appear too graphic if you make everything equally contrasted.
When adding details like text (such as the paper typeface and handwritten letter) try to capture the abstract feeling of those elements rather than studiously copying out the exact words.
That’s it! This mixed media drawing is now finished, hopefully you found this series useful and you are able to apply the processes you learnt when you’re working on your next piece.
Adding the final details in the background using pencil:
Begin with the darker background elements.
You can use the graphite pencil to fill in the patchy texture made by the charcoal in the earlier stages.
Approach the image part by part, breaking down specific areas into smaller forms gradually.
See how the cut face of the ham has more detail now that I have worked over it with the pencil.
You can also use the pencil to create subtle transitions in smaller objects like the handle of the knife.
You can also use the pencil to darken and smooth those parts of the drawing that have a heavy amount of charcoal – like the darker bottles on the right.
Passing the pencil over these dark parts of the image with moderate pressure will shift and even out the charcoal dust, making for a smoother and darker look.
Painting in the white tones using acrylic or gouache paint:
For this stage you just need some white paint (either acrylic or gouache), a little water for diluting the paint and a couple of different size brushes (ideally one medium and one small).
Start by identifying the very lightest tones in your image, in this case, it’s the paper, tablecloth, some parts of the plate and the highlights on the glass and silverwear.
Paint in the lightest parts first using thick paint and the larger brush.
You can add slightly darker tones by mixing in a bit of water with your paint to dilute it. This will allow you to do slightly transparent washes for the less bright tones.
BUT be careful not to use too much water as this will buckle the paper.
Once the larger areas of white paint have been blocked in, you can use the smaller brush to refine the edges of the light shapes (where necessary).
And finally, you can use the small brush to add thick highlights to the glassware and silverware (making sure to keep the highlights as very small dots on the darker tones).
Once you’ve finished, make sure to wash your brush in water so that it doesn’t dry out and harden.
Start this stage by using some compressed charcoal to loosely add more tone to the darkest regions of the drawing (background etc.).
It doesn’t matter too much how you apply the charcoal, hatching and scribbling is fine.
Once you’ve roughly applied a reasonable amount of charcoal, start spreading and evening the tone using a large brush.
It may end up slightly patchy but that’s fine as you will be working over it more – this brushed layer just makes a darker base tone to work over (vs the white of the paper).
One the tone has been brushed, start going even darker with the compressed charcoal.
Make your application more even and keep the hatching closer together this time (as we won’t be brushing it again.
Once the background is sufficiently dark, you can start adding features that are in the darker areas (such as the sprig of leaves sticking out of the ham in my drawing).
Make sure that these dark elements are unified with the surrounding darker tones. It can be tempting to make them lighter so that they stand out by that will disrupt the major tonal relationships in the whole composition.
Finally, use your kneadable eraser rolled to a point to neaten up any areas of light tone that charcoal dust has been spread.
You can also use the eraser to add more detail to the edges of the darker shapes.
Use a mixture of sharpened charcoal pencil and will charcoal to start adding more detail to the foreground elements, paying close attention to the shapes of the shadows and darker tones in the objects.
You can also use the kneadable eraser rounded to a point to remove tone from the drawing, in order to find lighter shapes (this was how I found the shapes of the light knife handle that sits in front of the darker background).
The eraser is also useful for erasing highlights in the shinier objects (metal, glass etc.).
Carry on adding detail to the lighter foreground elements with the willow charcoal.
Try to keep the tones in the elements a bit lighter so that they unify more with the foreground general (thereby separating them from the darker background).
Finally, you can use the eraser to neaten the edges of these shapes and keep the foreground nice and luminous moving forward.
Smudging with a Brush and Deepening the Dark Tones:
Begin by lying some extra tone over the darkest regions of the drawing – using compressed charcoal.
Make sure that you add enough charcoal that there is some excess dust.
Then you can use your largest brush to sweep back and forth and up and down all over the drawing. This will remove some detail but leave a nice smooth base layer for our subsequent detail.
Make sure that the dark tones are really pressed into the darkest region so that you get some nice rich shadows.
Once everything has been smudged you can use the kneadable eraser rolled to a point to neaten up any areas that need to be lighter and sharper.
You can also use some sharpened willow charcoal and to redefine any shapes that have been lost.
Carry on in this fashion – using the willow and compressed charcoals (depending on the value of the tone) to develop the forms.
Start by lightly sketching in the basic shapes with a piece of willow charcoal.
Use a mixture of lines and roughly shaded areas.
As you add more objects to the composition, you can see if the relationship between the placement and proportions is correct.
If anything seems wrong just use the eraser to remove and redraw until you’re happy overall.
It doesn’t have to be perfect – you will have lots of opportunities to make corrections as the drawing progresses
Lighter areas and objects should be left blank for now if possible – as it will make adding the highlights easier later on.
You should eventually get to a point where everything is loosely blocked in – with an evident difference between the parts of the drawing that will end up dark and those that will be light.
