Coffee Pot Three – Still life Drawing Number Thirty-one

Charcoal, white conte and black pastel

This was a more involved version of the last one, working down from the lightest light. I was mainly concerned with getting the difference between the tone of the highlights and the plane of the pot facing the light different enough, the plan being that this would make the highlights stand out more, have more reality.

This series of drawings is supposed to be teaching me about tone, so this seemed like a pretty good exercise to be doing. The next few drawings were done in a similar way. What I find interesting about this drawing is that even though the side of the pot facing the light is left blank, it still reads as white in the drawing. It actually looks lighter to me than the blank paper of the border surrounding the drawing, but it’s not, it’s the same.

This is showing me that it can be better to let the picture dictate it’s own logic in terms of tone, and that doing this can produce a more ‘real’ drawing than if I try to slavishly copy what I see. It’s a way of dealing with the fact that I have a more narrow tonal range available to me than I see in reality.

This is a sea change in the way I think about drawing, the full repercussions of which will not be fully realised for some time, I think.

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