ERASInG FOR HIGHLIGHTS - FOLDS OF FABRIC
VIDEO AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE
STEP 1. Rule up a rectangle in your A4 drawing pad
21cm high x 20 cm wide
STEP 2. Very lightly draw in vertical and horizontal crosshairs
STEP 3. Using the edges of the four quadrants to help you estimate shapes and proportions, draw the four distinct shapes, outlined in colour below. Erase the crosshairs after.
STEP 4. Using a soft charcoal pencil or a b graphite (2b or higher ideally), shade deeply across the entire background shape. Using a paper towel or tissue, smoosh all over to smooth the background, then lightly shade across the subject shape as evenly as you can. The whole subject shape should be a light to mid-tone. ROUGHLY 2 - 4 ON THIS 0 - 8 VALUE SCALE
The whole background shape a 6 -8.
Using your gum eraser, battery-operated and kneadable erasers, create a mid-tone shaded background, smoosh it all over by blending with paper towel, then erase the lighter tones and deepen the darker tones.
See the video under this reference. Visit this page to see some more references.
(you can clean up outside the rectangle now with your eraser if you wish.
At this stage I would rest a clean piece of scrap paper under your hand as you work over and around the shaded areas, to avoid picking it up and dragging it around on your hand as you go)
STEP 5. Now re-visit the red outlined shape here and break it up into the other loopy-foldy type shapes, squint to narrow down the values(tones) to just dark or light.
You could choose to just outline the dark shapes or just erase the light shapes (I think the latter is easier)
STEP 6. Do the same for the shape outlined in green. Divide it up into its other inner shapes/ folds. Also, draw in the edge of the table (blue) if you didn’t already).
STEP 7. Refine the circle shape of the apple to reflect its actual shape, which is more elliptical on the right side, add a darker shape for the part where the stalk will come out of later
STEP 8. The ideal tool to help find all of the shades in between white and black is a blending stump (tortillon). You can blend edges with it and as it collects graphite it can be a shading tool as well. If you have a battery-operated eraser, you can get nice crisp lines and edges where needed, otherwise, just use your gum eraser, and cut a sharper edge to make it easier. The very think light s shape on the left edge of the rolled fabric is hard to get without a battler-operated eraser or a special fine eraser. So you erase all and then ‘leave out’ the light lines.
