Messages du forum par Merc

Hello, I hope your day is going well.

I really love the way you simplified the shapes and colors in the second drawing (inside the car). I think that your choices captured the mood of the reference and gave the feeling of looking out the car while it is moving, rather than being stopped to take a picture. I feel like your trees in your third picture could use a little bit more purposeful attention to that simplification. Pay attention to the shapes the trees make and how to use your lines to create that shape, without having to go too far into detail if you are not wanting that.

The main thing I want to focus on though, is perspective. In your drawing of the room, the lines that you create are not following the perspective of the reference. The chair in the foreground should be at an angle that if you were to continue the line of the table, would intersect directly with the desk by the wall. Likewise, even though we know that some of these lines are parallel to each other in real life, when we try to make them parallel in a 2d drawing we need to draw them at an angle to each other. The easiest to see example of this is the shelf and the top of the window on the left. In your reference, the shelf has the slightest tilt down twoards the window. In your drawing there is a tilt upwards. The top of the window in your drawing has the downward tilt, but it needs to be more steep to give the appearance that the window is in the wall, and carries on the intersection from below.

I would reccomend checking out some info on 1-point and 2-point perspective. There are many videos on youtube about it and plenty of other places to check. Dive in and do some longer perspective studies and see if that helps improve your backgrounds.

If you aren't planning to hit the art supply store anytime soon, you can substitute the grey ink for any watercolor of your choice (blue is perfectly fine) Just try to keep the application of the watercolor as uniform and flat as possible, so you achieve a clean separation of darks, middletones and brights. Focus on shapes and lines alone, and don't get tempted back into gradients for now.

I just wanted to add in that you can create the mid tone using the black ink you already have. Just mix it in a separate well or container with water and it will create a wash that will function as the mid tone that Aunt Herbert described. It actually wont take much ink to get a good mid tone. But feel free to try out different amounts to see what options there are. Otherwise I don't have anything to add that wasn't already said.