ONLINE ART COURSE – COMPLETING MY FIRST PROJECT

This afternoon I followed along with the teaching videos and completed my first project – the still life of onions and garlic, using graphite pencils.

Here is a montage of the completed drawing with the first drawing minus the shading. It is amazing what a difference the shading makes, adding contrast. The really dark areas were done with a 7B pencil.

I am very pleased with how this turned out. I never thought I’d be able to do anything like this! The teacher led us through each stage, drawing in real time, and we have two reference photos, one in colour and the other in black and white, which is easier to draw from as you can see the different values better.

Here are some detail shots.

It is quite hard to photograph these drawings accurately. I’d probably be better photographing them in natural daylight. In each case I have had to edit them a little to improve the levels and contrast and they haven’t all come out the same, unfortunately – the white paper of the album looks distinctly grey in some of the pictures! However, I think you can get the idea.

I believe there are two more projects to work on with the teacher in this first module (graphite), after which the final project will be to work on a subject of one’s own choice – he is assuming that by this stage, we will have gained enough knowledge and experience to branch out on our own! I am already thinking of things I might attempt to draw.

This is turning out to be more fun than I expected! I do feel very encouraged that I have managed to do this drawing at all, and I am pleased with how it turned out. I think this course is going to prove to be a very good investment!

PS I re-photographed the completed drawing in natural daylight and with minimal editing was able to get a much closer likeness to the original. I didn’t bother to re-do the detail shots or the montage.