Month: February 2019

Materials

• Paper (preferably good quality paper that will hold up to erasing)
• Mixture of pencils of differing hardness (2B, B, H, HB etc.)
• Kneadable eraser
• Drawing Board
• Tape

Method

• Begin rounding the medium forms by softening the transition between the halftones and shadows blocked in during the previous stage.
• Only soften the transitions where the forms are round, some forms will be sharper so they will not need to be softened.
• While you are softening forms you can take the opportunity to even out your shading, it’s best to use a fine point (either a fine mechanical lead or a well sharpened hard pencil).
• Even out the shading by erasing where the be is too dark and adding when it’s too light.
• Avoiding working on the details yet, leave that for the next stage. For now just focus on medium forms like the cheeks, chin and forehead etc.

Blocking in Form Through Halftones

• Now that the shadows and dark tones are roughed in, you can begin developing the form by adding halftones.
• It is best to add tone in blocks or ‘planes’ as you still want to keep things as simple as possible to allow for changes.
• As each plane turns towards the light it will get darker – the closer the tone is to the shadow, the darker it will be.
• It will enhance the sense of the big form of the head by figuring out where the lightest highlights are and darkening away from this point generally and gradually.
• Once the planes are blocked in, you can go back and erase highlights and lighten tones where necessary.

Developing the Shadows

Materials

• Paper (preferably good quality paper that will hold up to erasing)
• Mixture of pencils of differing hardness (2B, B, H, HB etc.)
• Kneadable eraser
• Drawing Board
• Tape

Working within the Shadows

• Using the construct that you created in the first stage, begin developing the variations with the shadows or darker tones. The construct that you drew last week separated the dark shapes from the light so you can use this as a guide.
• Begin by laying in the darkest parts of the shadows as this will give you a better idea of how much range you have between the lightest tones and darkest tones.
• Now work across the drawing, patching in planes of varied tone, you can be quite loose as you are just trying to approximately reach the tones.
• It’s best to build up your values slowly, always checking to see if the relative relationships between all the tones is correct.
• When you have added and roughly adjusted all the dark tones, you have finished this stage and you will have a solid starting point for the rest of your drawing.