The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 4

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 4
Graphite Pencil on Paper
2cm x 18cm (0.75" x 7")

Exercise 4 from John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing is the same as Exercise 3 – except you use a hard pencil (H or HH) instead of a pen. I've been using an old Faber Castel 2H pencil - found at the bottom of a box of neglected drawing tools.

Ruskin's instructions are to use the pencil:

in exactly the same manner as the pen, lightening, however, now with india-rubber instead of the penknife. 

He observes:

You will find that all pale tints of shade are thus easily producible with great precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same dark power as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is apt to become glossy and metallic, or dirty-looking, or sandy.

And cautions:

You will be perhaps also troubled, in these first essays at pencil drawing, by noticing that more delicate gradations are got in an instant by a chance touch of the india-rubber, than by an hour's labor with the point; and you may wonder why I tell you to produce tints so painfully, which might, it appears, be obtained with ease. 

Ruskin’s remark that “you cannot get the same dark power as with the pen and ink” is an understatement. It seems as though there is a maximum level of darkness you can achieve with a hard pencil. Once you reach this darkness, you can keep adding layers for the rest of time and its not going to get any darker.

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 4
Graphite Pencil on Paper
8cm x 18cm (3" x 7")

I worked on two bars at the same time and I did some scribbling in between them to gauge the darkest possible dark. On a scale where 0 is absolute black and 10 is absolute white. The darkest dark in the ink scales from Exercise 3 is about 1.5 and the darkest I achieved with a 2H pencil is about 5 - so, not dark at all.

Munsell Value Scale

I used this handy values scale by Paul Centore to estimate the values of the darks.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Impasto

Common Hawthorns
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Impasto is the topic of Lesson 44 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler. Philip defines impasto as meaning thick paint and describes how applying the paint thickly can create a textured surface. Traditional tools for impasto painting are stiff brushes and palette knifes, but you can use a variety of other implements to apply and sculpt the paint. 

Philip explains:

... impasto has implied Expressionist responses to the subject, the physicality of the material as a metaphor for the physicality of the subject.

But he cautions:

... if the whole painting is painted thickly then the textual quality of this image will cause the pictorial space to flatten.

I followed his advice to save impasto for the foreground, or in this case the trees at the centre of interest.

I painted a background using thin layers of paint gradating from dark to light in the sky and grass to draw the eye to the horizon.

Common Hawthorns
Background

I was dissatisfied with the waviness of the horizon and the little speck of green in the sky. I was tempted to paint it again, but I’ve learnt my lesson from the endless repetitions of the glazing exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Glazing (Part 2)). "Finished, not perfect" is my new mantra and I realised these small imperfections were going to be irrelevant in the final painting.