In my last post I included a link to a youtube video showing how to use charcoal to map out a landscape watercolour painting. I found it very inspirational and immediately set to work on a piece that had been in my pocket for some time:
This is modified from a picture I took of my daughter playing on the rocks at the stream near our house. I felt it was a very busy composition so I used a matte that I had in my studio (for just such a purpose) to see if I could simplify it at all:
I really like the way the simplified version looks so far. And the cool thing was it only took me a couple of hours to sketch this out! It was incredible!! I was so jazzed about how it turned out that I thought I'd try it out on a portrait I've been wanting to do.
If you are looking for the image of how that idea turned out, you will look in vain. Suffice to say that it turned out very poorly. There's a thing in computer graphics termed "the uncanny valley". It's when you get a picture of a face that is just so disturbing to look at because it's just "not right". You've seen some of the talking humanoid robots that are supposed to look human, but there's something just not right about them? That's it. Well, my portrait looked like that. I couldn't even look at it to fix it, that's how bad it was.
I won't lie - I was very disappointed. So much so that I doubted my abilities and drawing sucks anyway, blah, blah, blah. After a while, when my brain calmed down a little, I came to realize 2 things: 1) the demonstration was for a LANDSCAPE not a portrait - likely for good reason, and 2) that I need a better method of quickly sketching out portraits.
The problem with portraits is that they need to be accurate. There are numerous ways of getting that accuracy, and I've tried out a bunch of them. One method I liked to date is using a grid to transfer/draw the portrait. The only flaw with this method (other than having to draw all the lines and then erase them afterward) is that you really need a LOT of grids to have an accurate drawing - the more squares the better. Then I watched a video by Carrie Stuart Parks on drawing animals and I found a new way - using a proportional divider. It allows you to take measurements of say a specific spot on a small image and enlarge it proportionally to a larger drawing (with out needing to do math! Yay).
I had no choice, I had to find and order one right away. And now I can't do any portrait drawing until it's delivered in a few weeks :( Whatever will I do? Everything I can think of drawing right now seems like it would come out sooo much better with the divider! Well...I guess I do have a map of a painting that I could do, don't I? Hmmm. We'll just have to see :)
