THE KEY TO EXPRESSIVE DRAWING

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Howard Boyd
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WEEK 4 Previously we looked at various ways to apply shading from the deepest blacks to the lightest of tones, and by now you should have an appreciation of the importance of white, negative space,

THE KEY TO EXPRESSIVE DRAWING Do you sometimes wonder why one drawing looks flat and uninteresting yet another possesses impact and arouses the desire to look deeper into it?

1 WEEK 4 Previously we looked at various ways to apply shading from the deepest blacks to the lightest of tones, and by now you should have an appreciation of the importance of white, negative space, and dividing your drawing into manageable parts. However, before you tackle three-dimensional modelling you need to know more about light and contrast, so that s what we ll study this week. THE KEY TO EXPRESSIVE DRAWING Do you sometimes wonder why one drawing looks flat and uninteresting yet another possesses impact and arouses the desire to look deeper into it? That s usually due to the degree of contrast. One of the most expressive and important components that you use in your drawing is the contrast between your light and dark values. The combination and breadth of values present in your work is what creates interest and sets the mood. Of course, in the hands of an experienced artist, limiting contrast to an understated range of light tonal values (known as highkey ) can result in a successful and delicate drawing but, without that experience, it can also be disastrously flat and dull. Conversely, using a broad, contrasting range of values can excite the senses of the viewer. This is not the same as saying a drawing is too light or too dark. A drawing can be dark and alive, or light and soothing. The key lies in the use of contrast. A High-Key drawing is one that uses a value scheme of light tones. It can make a landscape seem strangely ethereal and magical due to the high levels of white or light tone in places you would usually expect a stronger one. A Low-Key drawing (left) is one that is based on an overall scheme of dark values but with high contrast highlights. My own preference is usually for low-key drawing, but with a strengthened sense of reality suggested by the injection of high-key components effectively, low-key with soothing high-key accents. A low-key drawing In high-key drawings, images can evoke feelings of contentment, contrast levels are low, and shadows suppressed. On the other hand, low-key images are full of shadows and dark values, and can be 1

used to create drama in a drawing. They can also accentuate lines and shapes, because light can be reflected off them to give them emphasis in the darkness.

2 used to create drama in a drawing. They can also accentuate lines and shapes, because light can be reflected off them to give them emphasis in the darkness. EXERCISE 1 Draw the same scene or arrangement of simple objects twice using my Grey Wolf if you want to. Keep the drawing small to save time. I m not looking for accuracy or believable textures. It s just an opportunity for you to try both key schemes and to make your own assessment of the results. Drawing #1: High-key restrict yourself to a narrow, light palette of greys with no darks. Drawing #2: Low-key Use variations of dark tones with bright or white highlights. You could, for example, use light tones for the subject while including darks and blacks within it, and perhaps with a black or variegated dark background. Lone Wolf shown full size You will find a line drawing to print out on page 11 if you choose to use it, but feel free to use anything you prefer. And there s a copy of this reference image on page 12. Reduced to HIGH KEY Contrast increased to LOW KEY 2

CONTRAST IN USE Artist Carol Rosinski (http://www.toadhollowstudio.com) perfectly explains, Key is the range of values in a drawing and manipulating those values is a little like playing music.

3 CONTRAST IN USE Artist Carol Rosinski ( perfectly explains, Key is the range of values in a drawing and manipulating those values is a little like playing music. If you play the same song in a higher or lower octave, it s still the same song even though it sounds different. With a drawing, changing the key lightens or darkens its values, but underneath it s still structurally the same scene. Spinney Lane End is essentially a low-key drawing with high-key midground elements to increase the overall perceived contrast. With only the darks reduced in intensity, it becomes a high-key low contrast drawing that loses depth, mood and impact. Contrast can extend to other aspects of the work, such as warmth and coolness, and is not solely concerned with tonal variations. In Spinney Lane End I used darker tones to contrast the shady end of the lane with the bright, sunny fields beyond each reinforces the mood of the other. I wanted to place you, the viewer, in the shade and yet feel the warmth of the scene in front of you. You can use contrast: To shift the focus within a drawing, but take care to not create two separate independent elements. In the drawing above, the values of the midground trees serve to connect foreground to background. To increase the sense of depth and three-dimensional form. Low contrast tends to flatten form you may have seen this in your photography if you used a flash, which bleaches the shadows. To balance a composition. Notice above how the intruding bush at the right balances the darker left-hand tones. To correct a colour balance that fails in monochrome. For example, a dark red label on a dark green tin might exactly equal each other in value. Lightening or darkening either will restore a more realistic balance and increase legibility. To set mood by, for example, contrasting shade with warmth, or bright sunlight seen through the window of a dark room. 3

4 USING PHOTOGRAPHIC REFERENCES A camera does not see the world in the same way that we do. Our eyes can accommodate differences in light and shade as we move them over a scene, but a camera can only adjust to an overall average strength of light. That often results in burnt out highlights, and shadows that are too dark both obliterating the detail we can see with our eyes. Try printing extra copies of your photos one with the shadows lightened to expose detail, and another darkened in the often-vain hope of detail appearing in the highlights. You can use almost any image software to achieve those aims. In Photoshop use the Levels tool press CTRL+L (CMND+L in a Mac), make sure the Preview checkbox is checked, and then adjust the sliders. Dragging the central slider towards the left, for instance, will dilute the shadows and you can literally watch the detail appear. Now, as with the bear s ear, legs and coat detail, you have all the information available, as if seeing it with your own eyes, and you can confidently begin drawing. 4

5 Notice how bleaching the shadows has partially flattened the bear s threedimensional form. I hope it goes without saying that you interpret the original photo and include detail from the lightened one. You have to inject contrast back into it to restore its solidity and three-dimensionality, but now you can incorporate, or ignore, whatever detail best serves your purpose. HOW WE SEE AND UNDERSTAND LIGHT The human brain seeks understanding of a drawing and will quickly scan it for clues. It reads the paper as white, even if it s off-white, and looks for the darkest value that it can label black. Once found, it now understands the significance of all the tones in between. As a consequence, if the artist has used a mid-grey to represent deep shade, that mid value will be read as black, so the drawing makes visual sense. But it doesn t conform to the brain s expectations it isn t natural and thus lacks a true feeling of reality. And there s no mystery. As those weak shadows cannot hide anything, everything is on view and immediately taken in. Such a drawing doesn t invite further investigation. Always try to use a full range of values from light through medium to dark. As a generalisation, a good drawing should include all three. Of course, there will be times that the absence of darks will benefit your drawing in a drawing of a flower, for instance that seeks to emphasise its delicacy and a nighttime scene may require the absence of light tones. In this way the chosen key of the drawing can signal time, season and mood. The black pupils accentuate the strength of the white and ensure that it s correctly read as a white dog. As I mentioned in Week 1, when we were attempting to produce dark and solid blacks, be aware that graphite will adhere to the top of the tooth and some, depending on pressure, will enter the surface pits. That will often leave some pits unfilled, which will appear as white dots. Scan you shading and look at it on your computer and you ll see what I mean. In normal viewing the eye makes allowances for the pits and reads the tonal value as an average. Which means that those white pits, and any gaps, in your shading will dilute the strength of your dark tone. If you use burnishing layering with a harder grade to fix that problem, you will immediately broaden the range of values in your drawing and increase the contrast. 5

6 When you viewed the lightened bear you may have realised that its diminished contrasts and flatter appearance could be an advantage. You now have enough knowledge of the detail and the bear s residual form to illuminate it from any direction you choose. Ideally, you need more than one photograph to do that properly, as a single photo cannot supply more than an intuitive feeling for its three-dimensional form, but sometimes intuition is sufficient. LIGHT AND SHADE We graphite artists have only two colours at our disposal texture and contrast. Contrast is arguably the more important of the two, but there can be no contrast without light and shade. With no strength of light, even the most flawlessly executed drawing with perfect perspective and proportion is going to look flat. Our world is given its three-dimensional reality by light and shade. You see shadows every day, but when did you last stop to study them? We tend to accept shadows as natural occurrences and don't try and work out where the light is coming from, how many light sources there are, or what the quality of the light is. In fact, we don t need to because our brains perform that analysis instantly. The shadows you see, and those you draw, tell us everything about the quality and direction of the light, the time of day, the atmospheric conditions, and much more. The problem is, if the shadows you draw are unnatural in some way (in many directions but with a single light source, for example) the viewer will be unsettled instinctively feeling your drawing is wrong without necessarily understanding why. You should be very aware of your lighting and shadows when you draw. Know the direction your light is coming from and ensure you maintain a consistency throughout your drawing. Each object might cast a shadow, or shadows if there is more than one light source, and each shadow must fall in the same direction opposite to that of the light source. Displaying all the shadows is not necessary. Indeed, too much information often causes visual confusion. As a rule of thumb, include only those shadows, or partial shadows, that add understanding to your drawing. The human brain is quite happy to fill in the blanks for you. 6

7 THE QUALITY OF LIGHT I've mentioned the "quality of light" a couple of times, so what exactly is it? Light can simply be perceived in two ways: hard and soft. Hard light A hard light is most often created by a single light source, such as the sun. Because of its great distance, the sun s rays can be considered to be parallel to each other, which removes the chances of stray light softening the edges of shadows. The sun, and any similar far off strong light, will create hard-edged shadows and brilliant white highlights. On a cloudless day the shadows cast by any object have hard, sharp edges. Also, because of the absence of stray light and everything surrounding the shadow being so bright, the shadows appear very dark. Soft light This creates more diffuse and softer shadows that tend to easily blend into midtones. The sun shining through clouds on an overcast day, if it s strong enough to cast shadows at all, will produce soft shadows, as will a nearby street lamp. Why a street lamp (or any other lamp)? Well, it isn t a point source of light, because it has a reflector behind it, which spreads the light and sends rays out in all directions. Unlike the parallel rays of sunlight, this wide-ranging light can creep around the object being illuminated and dilute and soften the edges of the cast shadow. The clouds on an overcast day act much like the lamp s reflector, spreading the light wide. And on a completely overcast day cast shadows are really soft and have blurred edges, often to such an extent that you may not be able to see the edge of a shadow at all. That very soft light is known as ambient light, and it s so evenly dispersed that it's difficult to establish where the light is coming from. CAST SHADOWS From a practical point of view, shadows will be shorter the higher up the light source is, and they lengthen as the light becomes lower. Your viewers can instinctively read a lot of information from the shadows you provide. For example, long shadows indicate a low sun, so it could be early morning, but if the shadows are sharp and the trees are leafless, it is definitely a winter scene. Conversely, a high sun signals midday or summer, depending on the quality of the light. As I just mentioned, the sun is a point source of light that emits parallel rays, but man-made lighting emits multi-directional light. 7

A lamp s reflector reflects rays at many angles across its width. Only the dark cone behind the object receives no light and stray rays of light dilute the rest of its shadow.

8 A lamp s reflector reflects rays at many angles across its width. Only the dark cone behind the object receives no light and stray rays of light dilute the rest of its shadow. Not shown here for simplicity, those rays and reflected light will soften the edges of the shadow too, often to a great extent. Keep this illustration in mind as you draw and ask yourself Can this point under my pencil see the light, partial light, or no light at all? EXERCISE 2 8

Print out this image (from page 13) onto your drawing paper, assume a cloudless sky and bright sunlight, and then: 1. Decide from which direction the sun is shining.

9 Print out this image (from page 13) onto your drawing paper, assume a cloudless sky and bright sunlight, and then: 1. Decide from which direction the sun is shining. Drawing an arrow in the margin will help you to keep the direction consistent as you draw. 2. Shade the tree to conform to the direction of sunlight. Include texture too if you want to but it s not essential. 3. Work out and establish the tree s cast shadow on the rocks behind it. Remember, all cast shadows share the same light so they should be equal in tone. The rocks already contain cast shadows, so your shadows should match their value, or you can darken both if you prefer to. CREATING THREE DIMENSIONS If your aim is to make the drawing look as real as possible, then correct shading is going to be your greatest ally. In real life, all objects are seen in three dimensions they have height, width and depth and depth is the vital ingredient for making your two-dimensional drawing appear to be threedimensional. That depth, with or without perspective, can only be created by the decisions you make about the shading, and the shading itself will benefit from good contrast. With sufficient contrast, the drawings you create will really pop out of the paper. We ve been concentrating on shade and shadows, but highlights deserve a mention too. A highlight occurs where the light hits the object and reflects directly into your eyes, and it should be the brightest point in your drawing. Because, in the real world, we squint or contract our pupils when viewing a highlight we rarely see detail within it, so your highlights should be devoid of detail too. FINALLY Contrast can make a drawing, and lack of it usually breaks it. Before you begin to draw, always have decisions made about the lighting direction and it s quality. It s also a wise move to know where your darkest values are going to be before you begin. And if your reference doesn t possess strong shadows, invent some work out where their inclusion would be beneficial and then engineer your drawing to accommodate them as I did with the shadow cast by this Doberman s ear. It serves to throw his ear away from his face, contrasts with the sharp, highlighted edge, and describes the form of his cheek. 9

10 WHAT TO SEND IN THIS WEEK Exercise 1 Using my Wolf or your own choice of subject, draw it in two ways: using low-key and high-key values. Then assess their differences and think about their unique strengths and weaknesses, and where either might suit your future drawings. Exercise 2 Complete the shading of the tree so it conforms to your chosen direction of light. Then work out where its cast shadow will fall across the rocks and draw it. I m only looking for correct lighting and shadows and not texture or detail, but please feel free to include them if you want to. Next week We ll continue with shading but study its practical application in creating textures and three-dimensional modelling. And I ll show you the benefits and fun of creative shading when you take your pencil for a walk. Cheers. Copyright: All text, images and exercises included in this course are the sole copyright of Mike Sibley No reproduction for commercial purposes, in whole or part, will be permitted under any circumstances. Applying for written permission from Mike Sibley may permit extracts for display or promotional purposes only. Mike@SibleyFineArt.com Website: Videos: 10

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DRAWING FROM LINE TO LIFE Beginners Course

DRAWING FROM LINE TO LIFE Beginners Course WEEK 2 Remember last week when I asked you to draw blocks of tone with each pencil, and on the second line to draw as heavily as you could? The object of that exercise was make you produce the darkest