Of Graphite and Negative Space

So - my drawing education continues.
Don't get your hopes up {grin}. My drawing has not improved, I'm just learning about more drawing tools and techniques.

We continued with more Still Life stuff and there was some shading and perspective discussion.

Actually, this was imagined still-life with spheres added later at the teacher's add-round-things-with-shadows request.

This was the result of the next homework assignment:

"Draw three things from your kitchen plus a Sandwich".

So I chose a Hawaiian quilt-patterned oven hot-pad
{because I'm a clueless ninny that didn't consider how HARD it would be to draw}
and the Lunch that I'd packed for the next day - which included a sandwich.

I did my best to draw it and tried to apply the new shading/perspective stuff we'd been shown.

The teacher offered some suggestions on how to do the shading behind the yogurt/apple better and indicated his concerns about all the background shading I'd added (I tried to explain everything had been on a dark background).
He seemed pleased that I'd drawn a "pita-bread" sandwich instead of regular-bread sandwich.
{Harrumph - it wasn't pita-bread! It was a wheat-round...bread-thingy.
But yeah, OK,  in my drawing it does look like pita-bread.} ;-)

We dashed through more technique/practice in the next class:
"Thumbnail" sketches of a variety of sections of two long tables of white-painted "still life" bottles, cans, jars, etc.

 Yes, the one on the bottom right is particularly sad. {grin} He had us draw it without looking down at our paper.

The one in the upper-left became a larger-scale in-class drawing {because it had to include flowers and I liked the grouping}. I think he sent this one home with us to tweak/finish too.
(Click to em-biggen.)

 

Near the end of class, we had to draw a section of the white-still life items in reverse to show the Negative Space. The examples included the shadows from the items being left white. And for some reason this concept boggled me and I had a hard time with this exercise.

{And my subjects appear to be listing to the right - or
maybe it's my photography? Hmmmm.}

We were assigned homework to do a "negative space" drawing of 4 or 5 items from our home.
Bonus! He gave us a ginormous sheet of paper to take home to draw upon.
(Of course it was raining when we left class that day... {grin}).

When looking about my home for resident "still life" clusters to use in my drawing, I realized I have a lot of junque, uh, dusty..., uh, Potential ART subjects around my home. {sigh}

I chose to draw this bottom-shelf of an IKEA bakers-rack/plant stand:

It turned out to be quite a challenge for me, but I think the resemblance between Negative Space drawing and still life isn't bad:

{The interesting pattern in the shading is courtesy of the ancient cardboard puzzle-caddy
I used as an easel to accommodate the ginormous sheet of paper}

So...I'm learning.
I think most things I've drawn are recognizable - which is more than I had thought possible!
All-in-all, I think it's going reasonably well {but I need to pick less-challenging stuff to draw}.