Neutral Ground Blue Figures

With this assignment, we were introduced to a new media, a "neutral ground," grayish color as our starting point. Along with that, we used a pencil, an eraser, as well as chalk for our lightest values.

We started out by covering our sketch paper in the neutral ground. From there, we were told to look at the image in a different manner, to carve out the image with the eraser, and fill in the darker areas with our pencils. It was a little difficult at first, I was used to starting from extreme values, but it was something else to start off in the middle. So I started off with my eraser and began to create brighter values on my neutral ground, most of which were around the contour lines of the blue figures. Once that was done, I began to use the crosshatching technique to fill in the shadows of the image. Finally, chalk was used to create brighter values where needed.