Carl's Portrait continued...

Work is just crazy busy at the moment so I was only able to grab a short while to sketch on Carl's portrait; here's where I left off from before...

The face is lit by bright sunlight, coming from the right hand side of the image, and I'm trying to keep that sense of warm sunlight flooding the face. So each stage of tonal build-up is carefully done, so as not to darken the whole portrait too much.

Using the mechanical pencil I very lightly start adding lines to build the form of the nose. To soften any lines that I don't want showing I use the end of a Q-tip or cotton swab, very gently rubbing the pencil to blend and soften the marks, but always being aware of where the darker build up of pencil is going; I don't want to distort the look of the nose. As I'm blending, if there's too much pencil on the Q-tip I just grab another one. There are different tools you can use for blending; I just find the cotton swabs easiest and they're cheap and plentiful.

When I've done some work on the nose I move back to the forehead.

Again, I'm laying down a subtle layer of pencil and blending using the cotton swab. Any excess pencil that builds up I carefully remove with a putty rubber, and then gently blend again. I move around the face this way, building tone and form a little at a time, so as not to overload any area of the portrait with too much dark pencil. I need to retain that feel of sunlight, so doing a little at a time works best for me.

That's all I've got time for, the sculpting is calling, so this'll have to wait again til tomorrow!

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!