Drawing Shiney Objects
Many objects have a
certain sheen or glossy, chrome finish. In order to complete the illusion in a
drawing, you need to understand the concepts of rendering metal, reflection and
lighting in your work.
As with any drawing,
you will need to start with a basic outline of your object. A spoon is a simple
object everyone is familiar with.
After you have your outline finished, you will need to outline the
highlights, shadows, and reflection and refractions in the spoon. This is the
most tricky part of the entire process. To create the illusion of metal, you
will need to focus all your attention on drawing the reflections on the object
EXACTLY as you see them. It also helps to have an understanding of how light
behaves on shiny objects. For instance with the spoon, the reflections are
going to contour to the shape of the spoon. With most drawings, you use shading
to create volume in an object, but with something as shiny as this, there is no
shading, because all the light bounces off of the surface. Therefore you will
need to perfectly re-create the reflections in the spoon to give it shape and
volume.
After you have the shape, and outlines of the reflections in your spoon
drawn, you can fill them in with tones. What makes metal look so shiny,
is the contrast that it shows,(i.e. very light colours next to very dark
colours, and crisp clean lines). When shading in the reflections, use the
cleanest lines that you can to complete the illusion.
More shiney object drawing ideas:
