Exercise: Using black and white.

I thought this was a fun exercise to attempt. I normally enjoy very high contrast artwork and experiment with it quite a bit myself.

My biggest problem was coming up with what to draw for my line visual. I spent a lot of time brainstorming and couldn’t come up with anything I was happy with. Eventually, I was out at my parents’ house and the weather was clear so I decided to draw the house.

The drawings went okay. Again, I’m not used to drawing objects with accurate perspective but it’s something I’m really eagre to work on. The drawing is a bit wobbly here and there but it’s a fine attempt.

With the drawing completed, scanned, and inverted, I went to my local print shop and had them blown up to A3.

Now that I was confronted with the drawings I realised that the wording of the exercise was a little vague and I may be missing the intention. It says that when you finish putting in the black elements there should be no lines left, which is nearly impossible with the level of detail I put into the drawing…

Regardless, I kept on and thought about how to best do the exercise. I figured just thinking about a light source and working in shadows would be best.

At this stage I thought I was finished, but standing back from the picture I wasn’t happy with it. The darkest values just weren’t convincly creating a landscape. I looked at it for a while and decided on reintroducing even more black elements.

This is the final version I came up with.

I think it’s very striking, just leaving white for only one face of the house makes it stand out and create an effective contrast, but I wonder if I’ve made too much of the picture black. I’m not sure exactly if I met the brief for this exercise but I do feel like it got me thinking about contrast and lighting and it was fun to cut out all the little bits and glue them. Introducing kind of physicality into that process of creating a light source really got me to think about it in a much more considered way.