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Mike Sibley   Comment Posted Nov.5th, 2018, viewed 10 times

EXERCISE 2
These are all good except for the left-hand side. There you've shaded along the indents, so graphite has entered them.

Your dots are clean and very useful in certain applications. I've used it for flying drops of water, and midground white flower heads.

I may have mentioned this elsewhere - I misidentified one of your posts and had to delete my reply - so now I don't know what I did or didn't say :o)... but... If you imagine your central bottom line is a whisker, which should be tapered at both ends, you often need to blend one or both ends of such an indent into the surrounding drawing. For example, the root of a whisker needs to appear to growing out from between the surrounding hairs.

All that's required is to draw a tapered line in the indent itself - starting dark at the root and then feathering to white. I usually find a 2H works well for that, or an HB if I need a darker root.

Before you use indenting, first look for suitable alternatives. Indenting can work in a drawing but the line it produces is very mechanical, so it often looks false and unrealistic. Personally, I use it for whiskers and in areas of high contrast - for example, where the hairs of a dog's top lip overlap the shadows within the mouth below, or in the shadowy insides of its ears.

In response to comment:

PatHobbs Nov.3rd, 2018
Comment added to Drawing from Line to Life: DG104:5 Indenting:
Pat Hobbs

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