Richard Bell's Wild West Yorkshire Nature Diary, Thursday, 29th July 2010
HOSPITAL
VISITING gives me my one uninterrupted slot each day to sit and draw undisturbed.
This evening, I brought my larger A4 art bag, which includes a wider range of
pens. These were drawn with a Rotring Art Pen with an extra fine nib which I
keep loaded with cartridges of brown Art Pen ink.
I dabbed hatched lines of shading with my waterbrush. I like the washed out effect in the lower middle patch on the pear.
I couldn't manage the luscious sheen on the cherries. Using this method of dabbing at hatched pen lines, it's easy to overwork the shading. The bright fluorescent lighting in the ward doesn't help produce descriptive light and shade. Instead of the one gleaming highlight that you'd get from a point source of light here you have four lines; a reflection of the four fluorescent tubes on the ceiling above.
Also, if you want the highlights on the cherries to be the brightest tone in a drawing, you've got to add a slightly darker tone in the background, instead of leaving the drawing as 'cut to white' (to use a term used in illustration).