10-12-2020, 12:28 PM
Dang that's a lot of color swatches. Is this gouache? I remember kind of reading about doing that somewhere, do you think it's helpful to do?
Anyway, the figure drawing kind of got me thinking about approaches to drawing, and I wanted to paint on the image, hopefully you don't mind.
The weird thing about this ref is that there's definitely two distinct values in the shadows, I guess owing to two different light sources. You have to always prioritize what info you want to include, and what you're going to leave out since the medium is just not conducive to rendering everything exactly. You insist on preserving those two different values and keeping them separate, whereas it might serve the form better to just combine them, and make everything one shadow.
It would probably make your form read a lot more clearly if you tried to unify the shadows a lot more in general. The more even the tone of the shadow is, the more clearly the gradations in the light read against it, and that way you can depend less on kind of outlining the terminator line so that the shadow shape doesn't get lost.
You could do that by just taking a stump or something and just massing the whole shadow together, it would fill in all the gaps and make it more even, or just going over it with the tip of a pencil. Something I've noticed about Watts style studies is that there's often a real insistence on emphasizing that terminator line, to the point where it almost becomes a mannerism. There are some Watts atelier drawings that are absolutely beautiful, but you don't want to be manneristic either. You can keep the light and shadow separate just by unifying them.
If you just take a few pieces of forms from the drawing and look at them separately, hopefully you can see what I mean. You can render the form simply, by just having the right transition from an even toned shadow, and the line at the terminator isn't really helping anything. I also find that you have to omit most of the information in the light halftones, because there just isn't enough range to record that info without sacrificing the big read of the form. On the breast and the knee as well, do we need that shade around the highlight to make it pop out? I think you get a much broader effect by focusing on the dark halftones, where the light turns into shadow, and practically ignoring the light halftones.
That's just my thought on it, but I guess someone could argue it's just a different style of doing things.
Anyway, the figure drawing kind of got me thinking about approaches to drawing, and I wanted to paint on the image, hopefully you don't mind.
The weird thing about this ref is that there's definitely two distinct values in the shadows, I guess owing to two different light sources. You have to always prioritize what info you want to include, and what you're going to leave out since the medium is just not conducive to rendering everything exactly. You insist on preserving those two different values and keeping them separate, whereas it might serve the form better to just combine them, and make everything one shadow.
It would probably make your form read a lot more clearly if you tried to unify the shadows a lot more in general. The more even the tone of the shadow is, the more clearly the gradations in the light read against it, and that way you can depend less on kind of outlining the terminator line so that the shadow shape doesn't get lost.
You could do that by just taking a stump or something and just massing the whole shadow together, it would fill in all the gaps and make it more even, or just going over it with the tip of a pencil. Something I've noticed about Watts style studies is that there's often a real insistence on emphasizing that terminator line, to the point where it almost becomes a mannerism. There are some Watts atelier drawings that are absolutely beautiful, but you don't want to be manneristic either. You can keep the light and shadow separate just by unifying them.
If you just take a few pieces of forms from the drawing and look at them separately, hopefully you can see what I mean. You can render the form simply, by just having the right transition from an even toned shadow, and the line at the terminator isn't really helping anything. I also find that you have to omit most of the information in the light halftones, because there just isn't enough range to record that info without sacrificing the big read of the form. On the breast and the knee as well, do we need that shade around the highlight to make it pop out? I think you get a much broader effect by focusing on the dark halftones, where the light turns into shadow, and practically ignoring the light halftones.
That's just my thought on it, but I guess someone could argue it's just a different style of doing things.