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| Value of Tone in Your Portrait Drawing Part 2, ● Kurs rysowania, Kursy, Ludzie |
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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Drawing Newsletter January 2005 The Value of Tone in Your Portrait Drawing – Part 2 Part 1 of this two-part article I discussed the initial block- ing-in of the large masses of dark and light. The general rule of thumb is to keep it simple – one dark, one light. It is always to your beneit to work from general to speciic. For artists, as with lawyers, the devil is in the details. Now, let’s continue ... 1-800-427-2468 © All rights reserved. In The next step is stumping down and ‘painting out’ the lights with a kneaded eraser. I’m not particularly fond of paper stumps for charcoal drawing, although they work great with conte, simply because paper stumps over-compress the charcoal into the paper givingit a dead look. I use my ingers to stump and a piece of tissue to wipe off any oily residue. I stump in the darks in the same manner as if I were applying paint. I literally carve out the form while considering both the structural anatomy and plane changes. As I draw, espe- cially in tricky areas such as the nose, I ‘talk my way through the anatomy’. What I mean by this is that as I work out the twists and turns of the nose I whisper the anatomical terms. i.e., the nair , the alae nase , greater alar , medial wall , etc. If you were to wander into my studio when I am fully engrossed in a drawing or painting you would think a madman, or Gollum, was at the easel. I guess that is one reason why we artists work in private. This close-up view of the drawing illustrates the lat, inger- stumped shapes of dark and the painterly lifting-out of the lights with my kneaded eraser. Note how dark I’ve made the sclera (white) of the eye. Remember, white eyes have no souls! Also, I have not sketched in the iris. I save that for later. Some of you may be surprised to learn that I haven’t placed the iris yet. When a viewer looks at a painting they actually complete it in their mind’s eye. This is called ‘closure’. A case in point is Rembrandt. Looking at his later works one’s sense of closure just assumes that a hand, for example, has been fully rendered. Yet upon closer inspec- tion, when you stick your nose into his painting, you’ll see that that hand is just an exquisite array of paint blobs. If you’re in the Frick Museum in New York City be careful when sticking your nose into to a Rembrandt. The security guards will jump on you in a heart-beat. Apparently there is an unwritten rule: three warnings and you’re escorted out the door. I learned that the hard way as a student. The next stage in constructing my tones is to fur- ther articulate the forms and planes by cross-hatch- ing with a sharp 2H pencil. (As a matter of studio practice I have about a dozen 2H pencils sharpened and ready to go.) There are a few things to look out for at this stage. Be careful when carving out the light side of the face, especially with the zygomatic arch . Render it too dark and it will look like a bruise. The smile line ( nasal labial furrow ) is especially tricky. Over emphasize it and you’ll have a sneering portrait. I under-emphasize it; the viewer’s sense of closure will inish it for me. There is now a very important consideration especially when working from a photograph. A photograph is only reference material. You are an artist, not a copy-machine. Therefore aesthetic decisions must be made. What do you want to say in your drawing? What kind of emotional response are you after? At the end of a long day of drawing and painting, when the model has left and with the photographic refer- ences iled or discarded, what is left is the art-work itself. It stands alone. When people view your work the irst, and foremost, criteria is their visceral response to it. Sure, exquisite technique is great, but not if it is as cold and dry as yesterday’s toast. Conversely, all of the emotion in the world poured onto a piece of paper without competent craft and skill is pretty much like trying to listen to a busker who can’t sing or play a guitar wailing about how his girl walked out on him and took his dog, too. And you can bet she walked out for good reason! My model for this study is a Russian emigre. From the irst moment I saw her I picked up on a deep sense of melancholy within her. And this is the direction I’ve chosen to go with this drawing. At the beginning of this article I men- tioned that you must always divide by two: breaking a big dark into two darks; then those two darks into four darks. And so on. Using a 4H pencil I now developed the darkest tones with cross-hatching. Surprisingly, a 4H pencil will produce a darker tone than a soft pencil. Soft does not mean darker. There is a swing line effect to the choice of pen- cils used. Begin with a soft, easily smudged pencil and then swing to a hard pencil such as a 2H and inish with a 4H. You do not progress from, say, 4B to 3B, 2B, HB, 2H etc. Zygomatic Minor Depressor Anguli Oris Careful attention needs to be paid to the edges of the areas of tone. As a form turns away from the light its tone progressively gets darker and thus takes a soft edge. A cast shadow (think of a sun dial) has a hard edge. The shape of a cast shadow is determined by the shape of the object casting the shadow and the form upon which it is being cast upon. The ‘inishing’ of the drawing is a matter of tweaking and balancing tones. Whether you choose to bring your drawing to a high inish or leave it at a more sketchy state the drawing must read as a cohesive whole. Follow the few simple guidelines that I have given you here and you will be well positioned. The paper that I used for this drawing is an ivory colored Fabriano Ingres. The drawing measures 7 1/4” x 9 3/16”. This is a Root Phi pictorial surface (1.272) which is a dynamic rectangle. Keep in mind that your irst four most important lines is the ‘frame’ of your drawing. In art everything counts! [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |