Welcome back to my very “under construction” blog, where hopefully soon some aesthetic principles will be applied. In the meantime, I am here to talk about a brand-new artistic endeavor I have embarked on: Life drawing, specifically life drawing with charcoal. Up until now, I have attempted realistic portraiture only a handful of times, and even then solely from photographic reference. Life drawing, as I have since discovered, is a very different ordeal.
What began all of this was a brand new semester in my Master’s degree, which, this time around, came with the opportunity to take a combination Life Drawing/Plein Air class. Since this is the first half of the semester, and it is currently freezing outside, we are indoors to sketch whoever we can convince to sit still for twenty minute intervals. Then we write about it, which is why I am here to record, for better or worse, how my adventures go.
This week my subject was my sister, who was quite good natured about it, especially when she learned she would be free to read or watch a show while I drew her. She picked Charles Dicken’s Little Dorrit, which provides half the explanation as to why her expression contains elements of what she identified as confusion and mental distress. I stacked up a lamp on some books to get proper lighting, set up my easel, and started.
The drawing process began, as recommended by the professor, with a basic line drawing outlining the construction of the head and various angles. Because I had difficulty obtaining the textbook due to snow, I was not able, for this portrait at least, to implement as many tips and tricks as I hoped. (Thankfully, I am in possession of it now, and enjoy it very much!) However, it quickly became muddy, especially when I began laying down an overall midtone. At this point, it had been about an hour, and I was getting nowhere. I had erased so many times the paper was getting fragile, and everything was smudged basically beyond repair.
Here is where we learn the other half of why my model’s expression had wandered from “pensive” territory into the land of the depressed. I let her know that, despite being an hour in, I would have to start over. Every twenty minutes there was a break for both of us, but the lack of progress was discouraging. I began sketching the underlying forms again using a hard charcoal pencil with light marks. This time, I made sure to be more cautious about proportions and overall construction. At this phase, my model informed me that she looked like “a founding father” in the drawing. Not an entirely unfair assessment. We decided to stop for the evening and continue the next day.
However, things started looking up once I corrected some angles and proportions and began shading. My absolute favorite part of this process was using the side of vine charcoal to complete her curly hair. It made brushstrokes of powder that were easy to manipulate into wavy, organic forms. I added general values much more carefully this time, and took care to use light pencil strokes and hatching to understand how the lighting would move across the face. I also tried to pay attention to which shadows created hard edges versus soft edges. This session lasted about two and a half hours, since I had completed a half hour of base sketching on this new attempt the day before. Feeling confident I could refine the final details with studio time, I took a picture of my model in the correct lighting and set her free.
Finally, I spent around an additional hour of studio time cleaning up the drawing based on the photograph. I will mention that in the future I will have to pay more attention to the angle of the photo, as what I took and where I was originally sitting were two different angles, so the reference did not match up exactly. This did make me grateful that I spent time measuring the proportions at the beginning. Here, I added highlights in the hair and skin with erasers, and even tried some white charcoal in the eyes. This only smudged things around, however, so my solution was to use miniscule dabs of white gouache for the sake of creating that “human” light.
Overall, there are many things I see that could be improved about this portrait, mainly in terms of angles of the eyes and jaw, and definition of values. In general, values are my biggest struggle in art, so I am certain this class will challenge me to grow in that area. I did have a lot of fun seeing the portrait come together despite my botched first attempt, and I have already taken one step forward into better understanding the medium of charcoal and the method of portrait making. Stay tuned for more!
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