Monday, September 13, 2010

Working general to specific in a charcoal drawing

I just have to share a quick story before I forget.

A few days ago I finished this charcoal drawing of the male nude on a 12" square panel


And I just started working on this drawing of the female nude on the same size panel.



You can see that I am trying to follow one of my Golden Rules of drawing...work general to specific.  Look at the big shapes, draw in all of the figure before getting too defined in any one area.

Well you may know by now that I'm usually sharing my studio time with one of my two children, and of course that day Arianna, my toughest critic, was drawing right next to me.  She said

"Mom that looks like your picture", pointing to my reference photo.

I said "Yes Ari - am I doing a good job? Does my drawing match?"

And she holds the photo in her hands, looking from photo to drawing, and finally she says

"You forgot the dots"

And I looked at her and said "What dots?"

She pointed at two beauty marks on the model's side. 

I laughed, because I hade never even SEEN the beauty marks before!  I was looking at the large shapes....Arianna went right for the specifics :) Ah, I have so much to teach her!

2 comments:

Fay Akers said...

what a lovely story and lovely drawings too.

Shruti said...

o and i thought you will finish the sentence with ..." i have so much to learn "