Keep lighting and contrast always in mind when sketching—I couldn’t say it enough when I was teaching.
In almost every instance where a student was having trouble with a visual focal point or showing form, what was lacking was a clear sense of lighting and a follow through with contrast.
It doesn’t matter which medium you’re using. This is always key.
The great thing about lighting and contrast is that you can practice it very directly by working monochromatically.
I discussed this in a post this spring with an example of a monochromatic ink wash sketch on toned paper here.
You can see other examples of monochromatic studies in my Alun Armstrong drawing project here.
When you are working with contrast in a color work like today’s sketch, look for the cast shadows and the form shadows and ask yourself how can I neutralize the main local color of this area, to give it dimension—and shift the value?
Here’s another post where I show the pen sketch without color and then show the contrasty watercolor I applied to it.
You’ll see I left a lot of white paper in that sketch, to emphasize the contrast, and make the shadows pop.
If you’re having trouble seeing the shadow shapes and values it’s time to return to the practice of contour drawings. Take another look at this post where I break down actor Raymond Burr (as Perry Mason) into a topographical map of shapes.
This is how we identify what we are looking at and for. It’s how we practice our accuracy in sketches and studies, so we have the skills to inject contrast and lighting into our finished works.
A Great Week Long Project
If you have some dino replicas it’s time to get them out and shine a light across them in a dramatic way and get sketching.
You can also set up a still life of flowers and vegetables. I would suggest you start with peppers because they are oh so fun to sketch and great for practicing contrast and finding volume and shape through value shifts. Here’s some pepper sketches to get you thinking.
Flowers will be a lot more complex because of all their parts, but if you are patient and focused it’s a great exercise to break them down into the mass of contours that they contain.
Of course if you have a patient spouse or roommate who will sit in a chair and read under bright light for you, that’s another great exercise to work on contour studies and then move into getting lighting and contrast elements into your work.
Remember, these shapes we see can be refined and refined to the level we want for a more realistic finish, or they can be treated roughly as you see here in these sketches. The point is, practice of this approach is what gets you to the necessary contrast and on to the type of finish you want to achieve.
Start a project focusing on this today.
You can also go to my Vimeo page and see a speed video of me doing some direct brush monochromatic ink wash studies here. Seeing this will help you remember that you can BUILD value by coming back to an area. Start lightly, and return to an area when its dry if you need a darker value. This trains you to always be comparing one value to those adjacent to it.
Hint: For this project I would skip trying to sketch bananas (so high key a local color) and Bosch Pears (it’s the weird dull skin) to start with. Leave them for either later in the week or for another week’s attempts—when you’ve got more practice under your belt.
