Chapter Six - Day Six: Exploring the third Dimension

This chapter was all about the light source that helps bring your picture to life. Values are the different shades or grey between black and white and it’s these values that make drawings stand out, but also it’s these values you need to teach yourself to see.

This chapter focused on seeing the light source, every image will have a main light source that creates the shadows and highlights, before you start drawing your subject always make a note of where this is. Once you have your light source ask your self the following, where are the light values, dark values and cast shadow.

Finding these at first can be tricky, especially when working in colour, but the book suggests that squinting at your subject will help in determining where the light sources are sitting. Another tip from the book is to always remember the reflected light that bounces back onto the subject form the surface. Below is a picture Brenda drew to demonstrate this.

As I moved onto project 6: Drawing a sphere, I must admit that I found this excersies very frustrating because before this point you know nothing about shading and to be thrown into the deep end was a bit overwhelming. Only in Chapter 7 do you cover the different shading methods.

My Sphere bowl looking object

Brenda's sphere

(Please note: that photo examples are taken from "Drawing for Dummies by Brenda Hoddinott'' and the  above views are not representative of her and are purely based on a 3rd party view being Me! All snippets taken directly from the book are stated as been so)