Black And White Study

You should have your three items, your cloth, your cup, and your flower. So feel free to take a moment and kind of reposition them into a composition that you like and think of that vertical composition because it does have to be tall and skinny and make sure all your objects can fit within that frame without too much of them getting cropped out. You should move to the third frame. So you have three quarters. You're working on one of those quarters and you're going to divide it in half. I measured to make sure I had it exactly in the middle and you're doing that with a pencil. Then you're going to start to draw. So when you're drawing this you're drawing from life and I always begin my drawings with little marks to indicate where things are going to be placed. The marks I put on the paper indicate the height and width of a shape so I'm looking first at the top part of the mug so it creates almost like a perfect circle and I'm trying to measure that and I'm also basing that top part of the mug, the circle, and I'm measuring it against the side of the mug. So to me the top part of the mug looks wider or longer than the bottom underside of the mug. So if I do these little marks it's easy for me to erase and make adjustments because that inevitably happens to most of us that we don't get it perfect the first time. You'll see that I draw pretty lightly and I use a lot of hatch marks and I erase a lot so it's never perfect the first time out at least rarely. And then I measure. So I'm using like my tool to measure. Here I'm using a vine charcoal twig and that's just so that you can see it on the screen. If I were to use just a regular pencil you may not be able to see it so clearly. So why a cup? Why a mug? It's so that you can practice rendering a cylinder. So a cylinder is basically it's the shape version of it is a rectangle but a cylinder has volume to it and it's kind of like a cork or a marshmallow. There's what's called an ellipse at the top that's a circular part and then there's the sides of the cylinder which bulge out and it's important to show that it's actually three-dimensional. So some of that comes into play when we add value but you can get the gist of it now because you're going to be drawing the inside of the mug too and hopefully the contents of the water the liquid. There are two things about the cup that is tricky. One is the perspective because we're doing kind of a bird's eye view looking down into the contents of that cup. The other is the handle. So the handle is trickier than it appears. There's a slight twist to it. We're seeing both the top side and the underside to the handle and it does have volume and mass as well. So you want to kind of think of a ribbon. It's how a ribbon would bend around. If you get confused please call me over. I'm happy to show you how to correctly draw or make adjustments. The flower in the back is going to be fun because it is a free form which means an organic shape and that means that it doesn't have to be necessarily perfect. So there's all types of flowers. Many of them are either cone shaped or sphere shaped. So like the the rose is basically a semi-sphere so it has some volume to it as well and you just want to look at the shape of the petals and try and document that to the best of your ability. You are drawing the same scene twice. So I went ahead off camera and drew my other mug with the flower and it's exactly the same thing. There's going to be some variations like my drawings aren't perfectly identical but that's okay. You still want to make sure you include the handle, the flower, the cloth. Make sure those three elements are still within the picture and again drawing lightly. Once you get to the stage please call me over so I can check your drawing to give you the go ahead to start to paint. Now you'll notice that I've written on the blue tape that one side is dedicated to black and white and the other side is dedicated to working in color. It's important that you stick to that scheme. We're working on the black and white side today if you're at that stage. For the black and white portion of this I'd like you to make your own black and here's a quick review. Because we have the darker blue, it's called Windsor, I would suggest that you use Windsor blue, regular cad red which is the bright red and the yellow that we have and you're going to mix this with a lot of blue in it, a little bit of red and some of yellow and you may have to practice it and you may have to test it out by adding a little bit of white but it's really just blue, red, yellow, the three primaries mixed together but it all has to do with ratio, the percentage of red to blue to yellow. Take your time with this. I spent about three to five minutes trying to make the perfect black and you can see I'm making a lot and that's because I'm going to store my black into one of these little plastic cups. These are little solo cups, they're located right underneath where the oil paint is kept. There's like a cabinet, you just open it up and inside the cabinet is a drawer and you want to carefully grab two cups and two lids and you want to make about, I don't know, maybe two tablespoons worth of black, not too much, although you could share with a neighbor. So you want one of black and put the lid on, make sure that the lid is airtight and I would say you should have one of white too so you don't have to keep going back and forth. The lids with the with the tops on them should keep that paint good for like two weeks so you can keep using your own homemade recipe in that little plastic cup. Okay, so apologies for the film being blurry but you're going to start out with laying out some whites and you do this incrementally. So a large pile on the right hand side and less and less white as you move to the left. As you get to the far left, that's your pure black and you're slowly going to mix a range of values and you want to get a full range. So white is one and ten is black and then eight ranges in between. Now my black turned out a little bit blue, that's okay. If it's bothering you though, if this happens to you, if your black looks a little bit too violet or too blue, you can always adjust the main pile in your little cup. Here's what it looks like with the full scale. So you can see one on the right hand side is whites and then a whole bunch of grays in between until you get to eight which is pure black. So that's what I'd like your scale to look like. Make sure you mix plenty of paint so it doesn't dry up on you because you want to be able to use it. If it does dry up, oh well, you're gonna have to mix it again. That's why it's nice to have that kind of mother pile of black made in that solo cup. Just make sure that you wipe the blade every time you dip into your homemade black otherwise it could lead to muddy colors. As a reminder at the end of the day, make sure you put your cover on your black and your whites. Again I'm looking for about a tablespoon of white and two tablespoons of black in those little tiny plastic cups.