Talk like a pirate....

My fingers are all healed and I'm back working, sculpting and sketching away! So hopefully now I'll get back on track with this blog, healed fingers crossed.

Amongst my travels and activities during these few months I've joined a re-enactment group and plan to be a historical pirate! So there will probably be a lot of historical influences showing through in my sketches, and I have no doubt that will also influence my sculpting. First up is a portrait of one of the group's established re-enactment pirate characters 'Pete'. This portrait is taken from a photo so the first thing I did was ask permission to use the photo. That granted, off I went.

I measured the features from the photo and sketched them out at the same size on the blank paper. Again I'm using a Strathmore Drawing pad, with a medium surface and medium weight, a mechanical pencil with a HB 0.5mm lead and a small Crimson & Blake putty rubber, with lastly, a sheet of plain A4 paper to lay over the drawing as I sketch so that I don't smudge the graphite already laid down.

I always start with the eyes, to me the most important part of the portrait, if these don't look right back out at us then the portrait won't work. And I'll return to them constantly, as I build up the shading. I start with the darkest shade of the pupils and plot the highlights in the eyes and then work up the tones around them. I build up the shading gently around the eyes because there is a lot of detail in this small area and I want to capture as much of this detail as possible.

 

Looking at the photo I'm trying to plot out the areas of dark and light. This will give me the overall form of the face and make the face look more three-dimensional. The lightest point is the tip of the nose and the front tip of the tricorn hat, but the light is reflecting more off the nose so this will mean I leave the paper white and lightly shade in the highlight on the tricorn hat. I also think about the composition of the sketch, and I may push things into the background by making them darker if it suits the composition better.

I realise I have a habit of working from left to right in pretty much all of the portraits I do, not sure what that means, I just happened to notice it. Anyway, to build up the shading I'm using hatching and  cross-hatching lines, both in larger sweeping motions and small controlled strokes. You can see this most clearly around the edge of the hat and face. I'm not blending the lines on the face to make the shading smoother because I want the skin to look slightly rougher, he's an older man (not that old, but older than me!) and he's portraying a pirate so I want some roughness to the portrait. 

A truly amazing artist that uses lines to build up fantastic drawings is Laurie Lipton - to borrow a quote from her website by 'Artweek' magazine “Technically Lipton is a profound draftsman. She captures nuances of light and shade with masterful proficiency.” The size of the image files means they take a while to load, but I promise you it's worth the wait.

I've made the decision to concentrate solely on the face and not add in any detail of the surrounding environment; there's enough expression in the face to hold our interest without adding further information into the sketch. This is also greatly helped by choosing a good photo and having a good photographer who knows how to capture the moment. To emphasise the features and expression of the face at this stage I'll make the shading around the face very dark. It will help give the face more form, push it forward to become the focus and give a little more drama. I'm framing the face with a dark surround but I still have to watch that the overall tones so as not to flatten the form of the face. I'm starting to put in the detail on the chin. This is tricky because there is a lot of dimpling and texture but I still want the focus on the eyes, so I work the two parts of the sketch simultaneously.

The detail is there but it's a little too dark....

 

...but with a careful  application of the putty rubber I lighten the area until it fits in with the tonal plan of the sketch. With the hat and pipe left to complete I choose to loosen up on the sketch, adding in the shading but not to the same level of detail as the face. I want the face to really push forward in the overall drawing....

 

And that's it, completed! I think it's a good likeness, an interesting drawing, with just the right balance of detail and loose sketching and a good portrayal of an 'historical' pirate. Arrr!

Fantasy Head - Skull with Horns Part 3

Today I was back sketching on the fantasy head I started almost a week ago. I sketched the head's outline with a mechanical pencil using a 0.5mm lead on a Strathmore Drawing pad with a medium surface. I then started to fill in the shading to create a three-dimensional image using a black Biro pen.

I've been sketching this image without any definite plan, just going with the flow up until now but I had decided I wanted the image to use chiaroscuro - the dramatic use of light and dark to create the perception of solid form, so the darkness of the black pen seemed ideal. You can see as well that I've been playing with the idea of something being inside the skull's open mouth; I often make notes on my drawings so that I can remember the ideas I've had.

I'll need to fill in the background to create the sense of darkness to offset the light hitting the head. And there's a lot of background! If I use anything other than the same pen I think it will look odd so I'll have to persevere. I could add some faint detail to break the background up but I think I'm going to keep it simple.

The texture of the horns has to look different from the texture of the skull, so I make different marks with the pen, more scoring than gentle shading, although when I have built up the detail I do go over the whole horn lightly with the pen to reinforce the form with shading.

Most of the detail is built up with hatching and cross-hatching pen lines, often then blended to hide those lines but at this stage the hatching lines are clearly visible. I'm also laying a sheet of paper over the sketch, only revealing the section I'm working on so that I don't smudge the pen's ink and ruin all that work!

The form is really starting to come out from the paper now. I may make the shadows darker, I'm not sure yet. My plan now is to complete the detail over all the paper and then see how the shading values play out together before I start darkening any of the drawing I've already done.

 

So I'm going to complete the other side of the head and the other horn and then I will fill in the detail in the mouth. I'm doing it in this order because I'm still not sure about what will go inside the mouth so it'll give me a little more time to decide. There's so much more to do but it'll have to wait til another day!

Doh!

Well I said I would post both the good and the bad attempts at sketching that I'm trying to produce on a daily basis. So today's efforts fall into the 'bad' category. And it was going so well!

 

So I picked back up on yesterday's sketch of the 'Skeleton Heads' with the intention of creating more solid forms using shading techniques. Things started off okay, although I'm not sure the reflections on the glasses are right.

Using a black Biro pen and putting down light, cross-hatching lines to build up a smooth, blended surface I went about trying to give the sketch 3D form so that the skull looks solid. Not as brilliant as I would like but not going too badly at this point.

So this is where things start to go wrong. Now I have to admit I was partly focused on the drawing and partly focused on researching something on the laptop whilst I was drawing, and I could make the excuse that that would account for my poor effort. But even though I'm obviously not great at combining two different tasks at once, the mistake in the drawing is really just down to my own stupidity; I should've known better given that I've studied this a million times before! Can you spot the mistake yet?

 

Yup, I've gone and drawn two different light sources in one sketch. Doh!

It took me a while to realise, the light is definitely ambiguous but when you look at the hands the light falling on them just doesn't make sense. And the side of the upper head would be light, not dark. Unless there's a light floating around between the two heads! So because I wasn't concentrating I dropped the ball. As I said before, Doh!