As much as I enjoy the life drawing classes I often find myself frustrated at not being able to follow through, to finish the drawing to a state where I'm happy with it. Obviously that's the point, to work under pressure and get faster by necessity, but I felt a little pent up last night at not really making the most of the session, so sat down with a reference image from artmodeltips.com and, using Canford Dreadnought Grey paper and a set of compressed charcoal sticks I spent approx. three hours on this piece.
(Click to view large)
It took some getting used to; I think I must have spent at least an hour messing around with the sticks and struggling with the tone to use on the stomach area. I'm still not totally convinced, and think that's the most problematic area, but I think it at least has texture and believable roundness. The shading on the upper chest, under the chin, also caused untold issues. In the end, I felt that I was in danger of tinkering the piece in to oblivion, so I shaded once more and moved on. The left hand seems a little small but when checked against the reference photograph it seemed OK, so perhaps it's just the angle that it is being held at foreshortening it. perhaps by making the fingers taller it would have suggested that better. The foot was an area where, once I had a likeness to a foot, I backed away for fear of ending up with a slab of confused charcoal mush.
I like the highlights; always the best part of using any toned paper. The point of the upper back/shoulder especially helps offset the picture and the hot highlights on the thighs stops it degenerating in to a samey tone of mid greys. I purposely chose not to use a black and white image, or to filter it to black and white, as I may have done in the past, and as I want to force myself to interpret the light as it is rather than using too many assists. A practice like this is only useful if it has some challenge to it.
(Click to enlarge)
Background added just using tonal shades and a lot of smudging
The other challenge was how long it took to dig all the charcoal out of my pores.
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