Basic Drawing Lessons

In today's lesson we learnt some basic drawing skills, for example, you should hold the pencil at the very top and move your arm as a whole, instead of moving your wrist.

We then tried simply drawing straight lines holding the pencil as described above - we tried vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. This surprisingly was quite difficult because it is hard to keep your hand straight/in the same position across the whole length/width of the A3 paper. For example, I often found that it would start off quite straight, but then end up curving, or if you become slightly bored and found the task repetitive, meaning you lost concentration slightly, your line would go off course. 

We then tried drawing basic 2D shapes, such as circles, triangles and squares, again holding the pencil at the top, away from the led. I actually found the squares the easiest and the circles the hardest because it was hard to get them exactly round in shape.

We then experimented with the different shades you could create using one pencil, and we also tried drawing 3D shapes such as cubes and cylinders, and then incorporating this shading to make it seem more realistic (e.g. by making it look like it is actually on a surface). I found this quite hard to actually visualise in my head, but once I got my head around what areas had light and whereabouts had shadow, I think it was quite successful. 

Still Life Sketch
This is a quick sketch I created of an apple, I used different shades (by applying different amounts of pressure to the pencil) to try and create shadows and highlights. 

I think it went quite well because the apple looks quite 3D and you are able to see where the light is bouncing off the apple and where it has highlights, and where it is blocking the light to create shadows. The only thing I would adapt/improve is I would try to blend the outside of the shadow slightly because I feel it is not a smooth transformation.