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In Pencil Art Workshop, well-known artist and illustrator Matt Rota demonstrates several techniques in graphite, then ties it together with an international gallery of artists for inspiration.
The humble pencil is the world’s most flexible and forgiving drawing material. Pencil Art Workshop is the platform for artist and educator Matt Rota (author of The Art of Ballpoint) to show you key techniques that every artist should know. Following along with Matt is easy as he explores the pencil’s phenomenal, and sometimes surprising, range.
Turn to any chapter–Drawing with Line, Drawing with Tone, Drawing Quickly, Photorealism, Adding Color–and you’ll discover, through step-by-step instructions and illustrations, how to choose the right pencil for your specific project, and how to use it to its fullest in every drawing style. Each chapter in Pencil Art Workshop also includes a gallery of edgy and inspiring works by contemporary pencil artists to enjoy and to receive inspiration from.
From the Publisher
Chapter 1: Drawing With Line – Exercise 3: Volume
Basic shapes with lines to emphasize volume
The most important quality to consider when drawing volume with a single line is controlling the shifting weight of the line. A single line must shift in weight smoothly from thin to thick and light to dark (or vice versa).
To better understand the volume of the object you’re drawing, imagine the line as a piece of thread being wrapped around the subject. Wrapping this thread around the object in a sketch of the object will reveal its volume and help you understand how to use shading and line weight in the final drawing to best describe the volume.
Initial sketch to understand volume
Shifts in line weight can be done using the refined sculpted approach mentioned earlier: carefully modeling the line by lightly layering a series of smaller lines. Line weight can also be varied by using direct line, shifting from the point of the pencil’s tip to the broadside of the tip through the motion of the wrist while drawing the line. Be sure to have the pencil sharpened so that a broad portion of the tip’s edge is revealed (the amount of the broadside exposed will determine the width of the line).
Drawing a direct line with a smooth shift in weight requires confidence (pausing to think in the middle of drawing a line will create an interruption in the line and can spoil its elegance). Practicing the line as a warm up on a separate sheet of paper will help you figure out the right motion and angle for the pencil before applying the line to the actual drawing.
Line and volume: ceramics
Make the line in one smooth motion with a lot of control for accuracy. The curve of the line and shift in width indicate light moving over the surface of the volumetric object. The thin line transitioning to a heavy line shows where light hits the object (on the thinnest part of the line), and how the surface transitions away from the light into shadow (as the line gets heavier).
The curving of lines and the gradation of light to shadow on an object are usually the details that reveal volume, but in a line drawing where no shadows are used, the line weight has to illustrate the same point.
Chapter 2: Drawing With Tone – Exercise 1: Taking Creative Control of the Values
Photo reference for tonal drawing
A photograph of an image fixes the value range of a subject in relation to the camera’s shutter speed and aperture. The result is not a true representation of light and reality, but a mechanical approximation. This approximation is often taken as the de facto absolute in interpreting reality: Photos are frequently used as a reference for drawings, but the camera reads light differently than the eye.
The locking in of values is significant in terms of natural observation. The eye has a far more relative system of interpreting light. The pupil is constantly opening and closing to let in more and less light, so it adjusts value relationships based on the focus of the eye.
Tonal drawing – light range
If the eye focuses on a shadow, the pupil opens wider, letting in more light. It can allow the eye to see higher contrast and a wider value range than when the eye refocuses on a wider expanse of space.
For instance, in drawing a portrait, looking at the face as a whole will dilute the details but give a sense of the overall light and shadow. The details in the shadowed portions of the portrait will be obscured in low contrast when the face is looked at as a whole. Yet the eye, unlike the camera, can focus on specific details in the shadows and perceive them with a heightened contrast. Drawing the heightened details without returning your focus to the whole face can lead to over-rendering the details and losing the overall tonal relationships in the portrait.
Tonal drawing – dark range
All of this is to say that in drawing from life, the value range is never fixed and is always relative. This can be tricky to overcome, but realizing that a value range is not fixed can also be liberating. It allows you to create a tonal drawing using an arbitrary value range: the value range can be as narrow or as wide as the artist decides.
For instance, by establishing the darkest dark in an image as a middle gray, and a whitest white at the opposite end of the scale, the values in between will exist in the usual proportional relationship, but will be lighter on the scale, resulting in a lighter-contrast image. The reverse will be true if the lightest light is middle gray, with darkest black at the opposite end of the scale: the image will be interpreted as shadowy, in a darker range.
This choice and control gives the artist liberty to go beyond capturing reality accurately, but to interpret it emotionally as well, suggesting mood and drama in a subject.
Chapter 5: Adding Color – Exercise 4: Pencil and Ink
Use a light pencil sketch for the areas that will be drawn over with ink.
Ink and pencil have very different textures on paper. Ink (in this case Higgins Waterproof Color Drawing Ink) dries with an almost acrylic finish. It’s more transparent than acrylic, however, so in that way it is similar to watercolor. Ink sits on the surface of the paper rather than soaking in (unless a lot of ink is used).
It’s difficult to draw over ink with pencil, but you can draw with ink on top of graphite, as long as the graphite has not been used too heavily. So ink and pencil can be layered.
Complete the deer in pencil.
Another way to approach using graphite and ink together is to weave them into the same composition by finishing part of the drawing with pencil, and another with ink (as in the example of the deer drawing).
Start with a basic, light sketch of the image (try a light pencil for this—2H or 3H). Choose the areas you want to finish in pencil and render them while leaving the rest of the drawing unfinished. In this example, the deer are rendered in pencil and the forest is left unfinished for the ink. However, parts of the deer are behind the trees and emerging from the forest. When the ink is added, it will include rendering trees in front of as well as behind the deer, so the deer and the forest will not feel as if they are separate drawings but, instead, are woven together into one drawing.
You’re ready to fill in the background with ink.
Use a range of pencils for the deer—F–2B will provide enough contrast to make the pencil stand out. When you complete the deer, you’re ready to work in ink. Begin to draw the forest around the deer as well as drawing on their backs to create some interplay between the ink and graphite.
The styles of drawing at play in this example are unique to each of the two mediums. The deer drawn in pencil are more tonal and soft, and there is a wider range of value used to describe their form. In contrast, because ink is such a flat medium, the lines are bolder and the style of shading is more linear and flat. Combining the two styles spatially forces the viewer to interpret the space and the deer in the woods as a unified image.
Publisher : Rockport Publishers; Illustrated edition (June 1, 2017)
Language : English
Paperback : 144 pages
ISBN-10 : 1631592696
ISBN-13 : 978-1631592690
Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
Dimensions : 8.63 x 0.5 x 11 inches