During my recent effort to inventory my artworks, I rediscovered a bunch of old charcoal drawings. They had been stacked up years ago and left to get moved, smudged, and eventually ruined. Some of them, I immediately tore up and threw away. But some others weren't too bad. I wondered if they could be reworked with pastel into "keepers". So I gave it a shot.
And learned something interesting. My way of working in charcoal and pastel lately has been to do a rough sketch in charcoal and then do most of the development with pastel. It's an impatient method that assumes the black-and-white structure of the drawing is solid. If it is, great. If not, then making necessary changes is very difficult. A lot of my works have gone into the trash because the architecture of the drawing and the accuracy of the likenesses weren't strong. Adding color on top of that just gilded a pig.
By contrast, these old figure drawings were already fully-formed. They're all done with vine charcoal with white highlights on toned Canson paper. Vine charcoal is very easy to work with: it lays down a gray line or area and is very easy to erase and correct. I had already worked out the composition, structure, and likenesses with all these drawings and they were good enough at one time for me to keep them. So all they needed was some pastel to bring out the color.
Almost all of them came out well. One was totally unsuccessful and is now in the trash can, but four look pretty good. Here they are:
I took the lessons learned from this approach and applied them at our weekly life session last night. Rather than dive into the pastel at an early stage, I worked for most of the session on the charcoal drawing, then only used the pastel during the last 45 minutes or so. It looked pretty good when I left the studio last night. Now I need to see it with fresh eyes before deciding whether it's a keeper or not.
And learned something interesting. My way of working in charcoal and pastel lately has been to do a rough sketch in charcoal and then do most of the development with pastel. It's an impatient method that assumes the black-and-white structure of the drawing is solid. If it is, great. If not, then making necessary changes is very difficult. A lot of my works have gone into the trash because the architecture of the drawing and the accuracy of the likenesses weren't strong. Adding color on top of that just gilded a pig.
By contrast, these old figure drawings were already fully-formed. They're all done with vine charcoal with white highlights on toned Canson paper. Vine charcoal is very easy to work with: it lays down a gray line or area and is very easy to erase and correct. I had already worked out the composition, structure, and likenesses with all these drawings and they were good enough at one time for me to keep them. So all they needed was some pastel to bring out the color.
Almost all of them came out well. One was totally unsuccessful and is now in the trash can, but four look pretty good. Here they are:
I took the lessons learned from this approach and applied them at our weekly life session last night. Rather than dive into the pastel at an early stage, I worked for most of the session on the charcoal drawing, then only used the pastel during the last 45 minutes or so. It looked pretty good when I left the studio last night. Now I need to see it with fresh eyes before deciding whether it's a keeper or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment