Life Drawing and Our delving into India Ink.

This last week before break, we began our journey into using India Ink.  We began drawing fairly sizable contour drawings of our shells as practice (Though I used a shell that wasn't mind).  After finishing the contour drawings, we took our ink and some water and began mixing, creating different strengths of grays and applying them to our shell drawings.  At first I wasn't very good at this, being one of my first times and all, because as I applied the ink and water to some practice mini shell drawings, I realized that blending wasn't my fuerte and also that I was applying the ink and water as shadow only.  I took a look at some other people's shell drawings and saw similar things to mine, but some used the ink almost as a base color for the shell, and focused more on bringing out the highlights, which gave the shell a seperation in contrast from the paper and really brought it forth and made it look more 3-Dimensional by exaggerating the highlights.

I've used India ink before in Drawing II, I used it optionally to create a more styalized drawing in a set of three.  I primarily used the ink without combining it with any water, so most of the shadows were clean cut and blocked out.  Part of me wishes I had used water to create different tones of gray back then so I would be more prepared now, but best not to linger on what can't be changed, so as I write I'm just practicing blending on my own and creating gradient scales on a small piece of paper.


I'm really excited to get to my final shell drawing and even more excited to get to the final, I have had opportunities but I have not made too many self drawings so that is something that I will enjoy as challenging and rewarding.