![]() ![]() The artist begins to blend the lories of the fate with a lingenip and with a stomp. The main purpose of Step 4 is to establish a dear distinction between the lights (which are just bare paper), the darks, and the middletones (or halftones). Most of the original lines have disappeared under the tones. the artist moves the drawing tool lightly over the paper, pressing harder and piling up additional strokes for the darker areas-such as the eye sockets, the checks, the shadow cast hy the nose, and the hair. The lines of Steps 1, 2, and 3 rapidly disappear under the ragged masses of tone. The paper is so rough that you can hardly see the individual strokes-the texture of the paper dominates the tones. Now the artist turns the thick lead on its side and moves it swiftly back and forth over the rough surface of the paper to indicate the big tonal areas. The outline of the hair is strengthened with quick, casual lines. ![]() He traces the bridge of the nose and constructs the tip of the nose and the nostril wrings, He indicates the groove from the base of the nose 10 the upper lip, As he defines the lips, lie darkens the corners of the mouth and indicates the concavity beneath the lower lip with a dark scrib-blc. He draws the ear more precisely and adds the inner contours of the eyes, with a hint of darkness on the irises. He strengthens the lines of the jaw and the chin. The artist completes his preliminary line drawing of the outer contours of the head and the shapes of the features. As you can see, the roughness of the paper breaks up the pencil stroke and produces a ragged line. The one visible ear is aligned with the eye and nose. He draws the first few lines of the features over the guidelines of Step 1: the curves of the eyebrows and the upper lids: the side and underside of the nose and the upper and lower lips. Swift, curving iines capture the sweep of the hair around the head and over the forehead. The artist draws the outer contours of the face over the egg shape, capturing the curves of the checks, jaw, and chin. When I pack up at the end of each week, my head is in a foggy, charcoal-dust-filled state, tearing away at itself trying to comprehend what is real, and how to convey reality.Step 2. I imagine that filling in all these visible but not ‘real’ touches is what leads to ‘hyperrealism’ that somehow looks both realistic and garishly false. Our drawing must therefore offer less to match up with the external world. Sometimes I argue: ‘I’m drawing what I can see! If I can see it, why can’t I draw it? You’ll never fool the eye if you selectively take out things it expects to be there.’ But Nick calmly explains that the eye overcompensates, it takes in more light and more information than is really there. Bunches of grapes as a whole have a crevice shadow, a darker collection of grapes that are furthest from the light, and brighter grapes nearer to the light. Individual grapes have crevice shadows, real shadows, darker parts of the lit region that seem to be in shadow, lighter regions and highlights. Highlights on shiny things are hard circles, but on rougher surfaces they gently fade into the surface. Shiny bottles have sharp lines for reflections, but matte ones are blended. We change the sharpness of the drawing to depict differently-textured surfaces. If shades of grey are lost when squinting, they are to be ignored and not represented in the drawing. We squint a lot to cut out excess light to determine which highlights and reflected lights to depict. We start here, because it is the darkest part of the drawing, where no light can possibly reach. We always add the crevice shadow at the base of the object, to ground it. We run a paintbrush through the air over the object to see where the true shadow falls, and from this we can determine where the object is still in the light, but darker. To understand tone, we perform all sorts of tricks that are difficult to explain, to do with separating true shadow from apparent shadow, and shadow created by different planes of the object. Nick takes great delight in pointing out the flaws of my studies, but upon allowing me to pick up a brush and some raw umber, he granted that my hard work was paying off and that I am coming to understand tone. Which is to say, for the past two or three months I’ve been making detailed tonal studies in charcoal (my arch nemesis). I’m studying oil painting at the Atelier Art Studios in Brisbane. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |