For this painting I used one of my own reference photos — taken last spring of a rose on one of our bushes. We got this rosebush (all of our rosebushes, actually) down in Texas Hill Country at Antique Rose Emporium. I love it because it is powerfully fragrant. So many pretty roses seem to have no fragrance at all.
I did this using willow charcoal and NuPastels, on Colourfix Original in Soft Umber.
Today I watched a “Drawing Together” ArtistsNetwork video on YouTube about drawing hair, which is something I have trouble with — I typically draw “spaghetti hair” which, of course, is totally wrong. Now I’m learning to more accurately draw hair by drawing the shapes and masses, then just adding striations.
The reference photo is here.
This study was done on Strathmore drawing paper, using only medium willow charcoal (Winsor & Newton) and my trusty kneadable eraser. I used a paper towel and my finger for blending. Willow charcoal, it turns out, is awesome! So easy to erase or rub out and start again!
I was not focused on replicating the profile, but rather getting a sense of the hair mass.
These sketches and figures are based off poses found in The Complete Book of Poses for Artists: A comprehensive photographic and illustrated reference book for learning to draw more than 500 poses, by Ken & Stephanie Goldman (Walter Foster Publishing, 2017).
I left the center-of-balance line in the sketch of the boy with the basketball; in the first sketch he is way off kilter in an unnatural pose.
I was reading Mary Whyte’s book Painting Portraits and Figures in Watercolor (pub. 2011 by Watson-Guptill) and in it she talks about how imperative it is to watercolor painting to have good drawing skills, particularly if you are painting portraits or human figures. I suppose the same is true for other media, like pastel or oils. So, to that end, I did some drawing today.
Using a reference photo of myself at aged 3.
Upper left drawing is based on an arttutor.com reference photo. The newborn’s feet are drawn from a photo by sippakorn on Pixabay.
I’ve been taking Rebecca de Mondenca’s pastel classes on arttutor.com, and this is some of my initial work from her class “A Beginner’s Guide to Pastels”.
I find I don’t care for the pastel paper that has the honeycomb look, although it can hold more pastel layering, given the “tooth” of the paper.
Most of these are from using the Dick Blick Artist’s Pastels (60 set), but the (finger) blended blues are Sennelier Landscape (30 set) pastels.
Now that I’ve completed “Drawing Essentials”, I am browsing through ArtTutor for more classes, and am interested in trying out charcoal. (I have memories of using charcoal pencils in grade-school art.) In any case, in this image, I tested out charcoal pencils (upper left), Comte pencils (upper right), vine charcoal (lower left) and compressed charcoal (lower right). The white –except for the Comte pencil example — is my General’s white “charcoal” pencil. The paper used is gray-toned Strathmore.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 