I have to confess to having a model railway in my loft and I thought it might be interesting to capture one my locomotives as a drawing. I set this sill life up and photographed it in case it got distrubed.
As you can see at the bottom of the picture I then proceed to sketch the outline onto tracing paper not the actual paper I’d use for the actual drawing as |I like to keep that really clean and free of mistakes at least that was the plan as I am not the tidiest worker!
Soft pencils smudge really really easily, so being left handed I start on the right and have my lighting coming from the right so my hand does not cast a shadow where I am working
I am a leftie
Another thing to note above is to move the drawing around especially when working on curves to get your hand at the centre of the circle or curve you are trying to draw.
On of the many challenges in drawing man made things is the gradual change of tone over an essentially flat areas like the sides of the locomotive. So I tried and shaded with even pressure flatten that with a stump and then re work usually with a harder pencil to even things out even more. On the subject of changing pencils it’s a bit like painting with numbers where I try and use the same grade of pencil for the same things like those side panels:
9 shades of grey pencil
Other tips I would share are:
Take a break every half an hour
regularly stand back and look at the whole piece for overall tone and that the relative tones of highlights and shadows compare well to the original
Hold your work up to a mirror, or get someone else to critique as you go. My wife is good at spotting mistakes so I try and encourage her to give me constructive feedback and show her I am fixing it.
After 24 or so hours of work here the finished article:
