Glass

Kilner Jar
Ink and Watercolour
Moleskine A4 Watercolour Album
297mm x 210mm (11.69" x 8.27")

Sometimes it’s difficult to summon the enthusiasm to draw something else from around the house. When this happens, it's useful to have someone else suggesting interesting or unusual subjects - it's one less thing to procrastinate about. Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice provides a useful list of prompts.

Elaine gave me the book as a Christmas gift. The first chapter is about materials and the second explains basic texturing techniques. In the remaining chapters, Claudia describes the techniques she uses to render a variety of surfaces. For each topic, she provides examples that are primarily ink drawings with a little bit of watercolour to tint them and other examples which are primarily watercolour paintings with a little bit of ink to add definition. Chapter 3 is called "The Look of Transparency" and Glass is the first subject.

Jar and Bottle
Watercolour and Ink on Paper
280mm x 190mm (11" x 7.5")

The green jar and pink bottle is predominantly watercolour, the Kilner jar is predominantly an ink drawing and the vinegar bottle uses my current sketching technique – heavily influenced by Liz Steel's SketchingNow courses.

Condiment
Ink and Watercolour
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook
14.0cm x 20.3cm (5.5" x 8.0")

I need to be more patient building up textures and shading in ink. This is something I will work on with the next subject - Eyes.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Grey Scales

Chapter 4 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about tonal drawing (monochromatic drawings – often in pencil or charcoal).

Lesson 11 (the first lesson in the chapter) explores grey scales (a range of grey shades from white to black). I've posted greyscales in some early posts (see Tonal Studies and Keys to Drawing - Chapter 2).

Most dictionaries contain an entry for greyscale but not grey scale. Grey scale is probably the original spelling. Over the years grey scale became grey-scale which became greyscale (or grayscale) particularly when discussing technology. The contrary Blogger spellchecker recognises grey scale and grey-scale, but not greyscale - this is the only exception I've found.

The lesson includes an exercise to create greyscales in a variety of media. Philip recommends creating scales with between 9 and 12 tones. He suggests once you have generated a scale, you can use it as a reference to classify tones in the landscape.

I produced greyscales using pencils, charcoal, compressed charcoal and acrylic paint. I was too enthusiastic applying fixative to the charcoal greyscale and sprayed most of the charcoal across the page - this is an important lesson because the next exercise uses charcoal.

I spent most effort refining my acrylic grey scale. The upper part of the image at the top of the post shows my best attempt. In the lower part, the small blocks show a perfect greyscale with 7 equally spaced tones between white and black. The big blocks are a desaturated (black-and-white) version of my scale. This is useful for comparison because the black paint has a blue tinge in the paler mixtures - which makes it difficult to compare it against a pure grey.

I din't have enough patience for this exercise with the dry media. I will get some practice creating different tones of grey with charcoal in the next lesson "Block ins" and will create some more charcoal greyscales after that.