White Pencil on Black Paper: Light and Shadow
I'm not too keen on realism but as a student one had to follow the teachers rules, and for one of my courses at design school the main activity was drawing and it was pretty demanding. You weren't taught how to draw, you just had to, which was a bit problematic. Anyway, when dealing with space, you had to establish geometrical horizon and vanishing point, no fooling around. Handling light and shadow areas and generating volume was essential since the whole principle of the course was that things take form thanks to light. And that's the reason for the white pencil on black paper: light intertwined with darkness creates for the eye the necessary variations to distinguish anything from everything else. It seems kinda obvious but I had really never thought about the world around me in this way... Paying attention to the variations between light 'n shadow on what I had to draw got me these results.
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| Here I drew my own hand holding some cylinder object, I think it was a perfume case. |
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| This one I drew from a live model, it's unfinished and I kinda like it that way. |
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| This is how I felt at design school sometimes... |
Since my primary area of study was audiovisual content, not the art of drawing, I think the handling of light and darkness was kind of tied to how cameras function. In very basic terms when using a camera of any kind you let in light to some degree or other into the darkness within, and that allows for the creation of an image. It is in the interaction of light and shadow that different styles and effects can be crafted. Not to mention that movies have taken a lot from other forms of art which are more strictly visual, such as painting.
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| I'm not saying these paintings and movies are directly related, I'm just emphasizing that people's fascination with the effects of light and shadow within a composition has been around since way before the existence of photography and cinema. |
