Skull - Finished!

It is very rainy in Kitchener today.  And they’re calling for severe freezing rain with hail – welcome spring!  It’s a day that makes me glad I can lock myself in my studio for a few hours and ignore the world.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you know that I’ve been trying to iron out the shading for the skull.  I tried looking at various skulls online, I made a maquette out of playdough and clay, and I checked out a whole bunch of webpages with how-to’s on skulls (gosh there’s a lot of these!), and none of these ideas really worked for me. 

Yesterday I had what I like to call “a V8 moment”.  A friend of mine has a skull jar.  It’s really nice, covered in celtic markings and relatively realistic in proportion.  I have seen this skull daily for years, but it never occurred to me to take a picture of it until yesterday. 

I positioned it with the light source in the right spot, then took the pic home and did some computer manipulation to grey scale and sharpen as I need it to be.  Amazingly (sarcasm) everything came together for me very quickly with this new reference (shaking head).  There are times when I get too clever for my own good and it stands in the way of my smarts :P

After 2 hours of absolute zen shading, I have a (mostly) finished skull.  It’s about 99% done.  I want to add more texturing in the forehead area, though not too much as the light is directly hitting there, but then I think it’s done.  What do you think?  Can you still see the name?

I love pencil work.  It’s taken me years of practice to get to the point that 2 hours straight work doesn’t completely wear me out, or cause cramped muscles.  Now I really enjoy that time - I find something so calming about repetitively sweeping the pencil across the page to blend or darken an area.  It’s very relaxing and then when I’m done the final piece looks so smooth and textured! 

Here’s a pic of the materials I used to finish the drawing (2H & 4B pencils, pen eraser, electric eraser, kneaded eraser, white eraser, and drafting brush).  You can see that it’s really shiny on the darkest part of the skull in the jaw – that’s how much graphite is in that section.  I may have pressed too hard in my attempt to darken as much as I could, but the real-life image looks really nice.  Now to do the final shading and spray with fixative.