Values and Values

Doctor's waiting room, as I waited for someone to have a procedure.  I worked today with Strathmore mm 500 paper, a Tombow dual brush pen color 947, and a Derwent waterbrush.

I knew I was going to have an hour or more to entertain myself while I waited in this room, so I decided to take only my journal, one Tombow pen and a waterbrush and see what happened.

I wanted to work on overall page layout, notetaking, values and shading with water media.

I started with the thumbnail in the top left.  I was considering whether or not to do one picture of a portion of the room on the spread.  But even in the two minutes the thumbnail took me, one of  the people left.  So I decided to do single subjects, because I thought it would be easier for me to adjust if anyone left.

My big aha moment came as I saw how to get so many different values out of the one pen.

What I really like about this spread is the values!  I feel like I am getting better at it--these sketches have more energy and personality and heft to them than anything I've been able to do before. 

Also, you can see from the notes, that really studying these folks in the waiting room led to me thinking a lot about pain (this was a pain clinic of sorts), what we endure, what we bring on ourselves (the people eating super hot foods on the waiting room TV), and how grateful I am for my health. 

Practicing seeing values (visually) helped me see values (in my life). 

Cool.

This post comes from work I did in a class with Roz Stendahl, Drawing Practice:  Drawing Live Subjects in Public.  I recommend it!