Today we started to learn how to create the illusion of three dimensions in two dimensional shapes by choosing a direction of the light hitting the object and adding shadows and contour lines that glide over the surface of the shape.

Our teacher gave us styrofoam spheres and instructed us to “pet the sphere” then follow the path of our hands with our pencils on the page. This was a concept that my Portraits instructor first introduced and I just could not understand in that class (leading me to decide to skip the last few classes because I felt I was being pressured to use a technique I was not ready for).

This time, however, I was ready and now I feel like both my brain and my hands are beginning to understand.