How to make this up- Put a box on a table, and drape with a white or light colored cloth (sheet, towel, etc). Find 4 white or light colored objects of similar size. Arrange with one on the box and the others around it on the table. Shine a directional light on it to create strong light and shadow patterns. Do your best to match the light and shadow in the still life, while still paying attention to the shapes of individual objects, and the proportions and spacing of the objects. Remember that when doing value drawings, you want to eliminate as many lines as possible from the final drawing, having edges of value shapes instead. Then do the following drawings:
Value Reduction Drawing- Take a sheet of your 18" x 24" paper, and use your vine charcoal to fill the page with an even dark gray tone. Then use your kneaded eraser to draw from the set up (see the example above), erasing out the light tones that you see in the set up. If you erase too much, fill it back in with your vine charcoal. If you have spray fixative, you should use it to permanently fix the charcoal to the page once the drawing is finished. Students in class spent about an hour on the drawing.
Compressed Charcoal Drawing- Replace two of the white objects in your still life with dark colored objects of similar size. Take a new sheet of 18" x 24" paper. Use your compressed charcoal to draw the still life on white paper, as in the above student example. (do not fill in the page with compressed charcoal first, as it is very difficult to erase) Students in class spent about 90 minutes on the drawing.
Both of these are portfolio exercises that must be made up by the end of the semester to get credit, but it is strongly recommended that you do it in the next week for practice, because next week we'll be doing a charcoal graded project.
