I remedied the enormous forearm problem in today’s portrait. The most important feature in the sketch below is the delicate positioning of the young lady’s hand. Therefore, the forearm-to-upperarm ration is consequential. I’m having second thoughts about the title of this sketch. The subject’s pose does not suggest that she is leaning very hard on […]
When concentrating on individual parts of a portrait sketch, sometimes itty-bitty errors add up. In the case of the image below, the cumulative inaccuracies were bridged by the enormity of the young lady’s arm upon which her head lay. When I began the sketch, her head was gracefully touching the apex of her angled wrist. […]
Nice walk to the lake today. Half hour to the lake, half hour to sketch and half hour back. That was the plan. I brought different pencils with me: a very soft 8B, a soft 4B, another soft 2B and a harder HB. After 30 minutes sitting on a bench, I finished the sketch you […]
Having not had any face time today, I resorted to copying a photograph. The photo was taken during a visit to the Japanese garden a couple of weeks ago. An enlargement did not show much facial detail, so I used this sketch to practice shading technique. I used different pencils with hardness ranging from HB […]
Usually, waiting rooms are filled with people. Today the receptionist was the sole person there and only visible from the neck up thanks to the high counter surrounding her. When I was done, her likeness looked like the ones you see on foreign coins. Unsatisfying. Fortunately, I had another opportunity to sketch. A young man […]
One of my previous posts was a double portrait of a woman and a young lady whose elongated face reminded me of one of Modigliani’s portraits. Below is a closer rendition of the same young lady from that post. The proportions of the face are less Modigliani-ish, below.
I spent more than my usual 15 minutes for this sketch. I had time to make sure of proportions, shade the surfaces and place background items, to give an idea of the environment.
Here is a woman waiting for her hairdresser. She has already been enrobed. More work would improve this sketch: darker darks (especially on the robe). This would pop the figure out of the low-contrast background.
Another waiting area, this time with an opportunity to observe beauty in the making. I couldn’t decide if the lady in this sketch was reading one of those scary magazines or was in the middle of some kind of treatment.
There were so many trees, each of them different: different kinds of leaves, different tones, different shadings. The sketch below is a meditation. I could have worked on it all day. The overcast lighting would not have changed the shadowing that much. I have a photograph of this scene, so I can get back to […]
