[the occasional] Dumb Sketch
Backing away from the daily sketching of 2015, to observe more slowly and acutely.
Face Without Lines–#111
I hope you don’t meet this person in a dark alley. She looks dangerous.
Much as I love outlining what I see with dark ink lines, I would also like to use shadow and value to to define edges. I picked up William L. Maughan’s The Artist’s Complete Guide to Drawing the Head and quickly made a bad version of lovely drawing of Maughan’s. Starting with shadow is even more difficult in every way: getting anatomy right, proportions, nose, eyes, chin, lips–every piece of the drawing is that much more difficult.
And yet there is the sense that avoiding a line could give a more realistic result. Maybe. Someday. Perhaps.
Discouraging beginning. But…one moves on.
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11 comments on “Face Without Lines–#111”
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[the occasional] Dumb Sketch 
I tried an ink drawing last night and almost trashed it immediately! Not a forgiving medium. This to me looks much better than your earlier faces. You’re improving! Is that your sense? I feel like I’ve checked that book out from the library and it’s a goodie. One step at a time….you’re getting there.
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Thanks. I think this looks less cartoonish, and maybe that’s a look I’d like to step away from for a time. It’ really hard to see and then place the dark, negative shapes in a way that makes sense. But I’m curious to see if I can get better at it.
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The proportion is fine…the outlining of the left eye is dark compared with the rest of the lines in the drawing, but otherwise a good rendering of a woman (as you point out) that you wouldn’t want to mess with.
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Thanks. I started with that dark eye (her right eye, I suppose) but then could not seem to carry through with the second eye. I’ll try again.
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Nice!
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Thanks.
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So happy that you like the book! I love it!!! I think you did a great job here, can´t wait to see where it´ll take you! At the beginning it´s hard, but all it takes is practice (as we know 😉).
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Thanks! Again it involves seeing things I normally don’t see: dark, negative spaces I typically gloss over.
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I like this. I think the focus on the negative space helps to define her. The tricky thing with shadows is to really focus on their shape and value and positioning the same way as you would with a feature.
I’ve never tried constructing a drawing entirely through the negative space. It seems like an interesting experiment though and I think this is a great first effort :).
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No reason to feel discouraged! I think that this shows much improvement. Copying other artists work is a great way of understanding how they do it.. You could basically try and copy that book from cover to cover and see where that will lead you..
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If you only fix the left eye in fact.. that would make this drawing twice as good!
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