Daily Drawing Challenge: Day 20 - Ice

Hi everyone sharing today my ice drawing from the daily drawing challenge day 20. It shows 3 ice cubes on a plate drawn from life and it is my first time trying this.

This is a photo of the view I had when drawing them. As you can see it is quite hard to see the small details and variations in tones. It is partly because of my camera but also because ice is quite difficult to draw. It will require a little artistic license to represent them.

I will now share the process of the drawing.
I started with a rough outline of the ice cubes and then made my paper grey by using a blending stump to blend the pencil graphite. This will be a mid tone and will help in creating the highlights and dark tones.

Here I add all the darkest tones I can see using 5B and 6B pencils.

I struggled to get the darkest tones and it was still a little flat so I used a charcoal stick for the very darkest tones.

The next step involved using a putty rubber to add the highlights. I noticed for ice you want strong highlights next to the very darkest tones to create the sense of form they have. I then added the rest of the background details.

The final image involved a little composition by making the focal point a little off center and increasing the contrast slightly on the image.

It was my first time ever drawing ice cubes and I learned a lot from drawing a translucent object. I would encourage you to try it out yourself.

If you haven't checked out the drawing challenge I would encourage you to try it. You can start from any day.

Thanks for stopping by and supporting my work :)

Ian,