Baseline Drawing: 1

I'm going to do a series of baseline drawings in order to keep a record of my current skill level. There will be three total: a still life, an interior space, and a self portrait. With each drawing, as with all drawings I complete, I'm going to make notes about things I had trouble with while completing each piece and new approaches that I used to circumvent the problems.


Drawing #1: Small Object Still Life

Notes

Lines

• I had a hard time figuring out the size of certain parts of the drawing. For example, how far to extend the edges of the lighter. I decided to first sketch the shot glass, which had a much more easily guesstimated distance from the puck and used easily identifiable areas of the shot glass as reference points.

Shading

• I had trouble deciding between normal hatching and contour hatching. While shading in the puck, I was naturally inclined to shade along the curvature of the puck, since it's circular. However, I found that doing so gave the puck an unrealistic dimension, much like a sphere. Switching to parallel hatching turned out much better.
• While shading, it was helpful to place a blank piece of paper over the portion of the image I was resting my drawing hand on. This helped prevent smudging.

Highlighting

• I didn't start out shading lightly enough, so the entire picture is, in general, a little darker than what I wanted it to be. I noted to start out with a harder pencil (2H) so that this problem wouldn't happen. This would also make sure that the outlines are fairly light and easy to erase.
• I also had trouble making a realistic transition from a dark portion of the picture to what I wanted to be a really light portion. I found that it was best not to worry about the highlights when making the transition from a darker portion. Instead, it was easier to create a realistic gradient from the dark portions and then go back with an eraser and erase areas that should be dramatically highlighted. I then used a harder pencil to blend these areas into the gradient.
• It was also important to keep track of reflected light, not just surfaces lighted as a direct result of the light source. 

Resources
http://painting-course.com/88/drawing-lessons/start-drawing/