Negative Space Drawing and Shades of Gray

The above photo is an exercise in negative space drawing. In each picture, the one on the left was already drawn in the book and the one on the right is what I drew into a blank space. I drew the negative space and ended up with a white man and a white tree. It does make you look at the shape of the negative space instead of the image you're trying to draw. I used a black Prismacolor marker in each one.

With this next exercise, I was put behind a few days because I did not have gray Prismacolor markers, only black. I did have some other brand markers and tried it with those but guess I got spoiled to Prismacolor! So I went shopping and found out that they DO sell the Prismacolor markers separately. The grays comes in percentages of gray and I think I will still have to go back to shop for some more grays. I bought a 40% cool gray and an 80% cool gray and had black so I thought that would be correct for these exercises but I was wrong. As you can see in the bottom exercise, the black and 80% cool gray are too close together in tone. I did the same thing in this exercise as I did in the top photo. The picture on the left is the picture already drawn in the book and the one on the right is mine.

I did try it in color before I purchased the gray markers and I think it would be a good idea to go back and do that in monotones, different shades or tones of a certain color so it will help me to see the difference in tones, whether it be gray or a color.

This exercise is important because it will help in shading and highlighting and tones in-between when I transfer to other mediums such as paint, pastels, colored pencils, etc. as well as continuing with the markers. I really like those markers!
I also bought a colorless blender (which I didn't know existed) that I can't wait to play around with.

The next exercise is to use the different tones in color (or gray) and draw tiger lilies. I tried that in colors and did not like my results enough to post. I really think my problem was the photo in the book to use as my example was a poor photo. I could not really see the fine differences in tones so I am going to skip that lily exercise and find other images that are clearer to try to give depth to drawings with the shading, highlighting, and in-between in color and grays, too. And I want to play with the colorless blender.