Peter's Sketchbook

[Peter]

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.

Yh it's all in gouache, I thought about doing them in oil but then it's finding somewhere to store threm while they dry and the cleanup since I was doing these daily which made gouache more appealing. Plus I really like gouache :)

I'd say it was helpful in the sense that it made me aware of  just how many colour combinations can be achieved through a palette and just the posibilties through just mixing 2 colours since depending on what I mix I can make a warm green, a cool green, a dull green or a light green etc etc. I think mainly it helped open my eyes and has helped me memorize (to an extent) how to mix certain shades of a particular colour. Tbh I'd like to do a few more of these for a zorn palette and a wam/cool palette although I might wait a little bit since It might be hard to fit it into my schedule.

Thanks for the paint over and the feedback.  :)   I think my main problem which I can't seem to shake is my insistence to try and replicate what I am seeing in front of me, rather than taking artistic license and altering areas that are confusing (like the shadows in this one) and altering it so that it is easier for the viwer to understand. I seem to have the mindset that if I alter or "stray" from the reference then I am no longer depicting what I see in front of me.

I completely agree with the points you made, it's those types of choices that I'd like to make for myself when I am studying but for the life of me I can't seem to alter my approach.

I've been pondering whether I should do more academic studies like yourself such as bargue plates or perhaps purchase some of Juliette Artisde's books and follow her exercises, maybe even look at Dorien Iten's light/shadow course. I'd love to hear your feedback on this, possibly suggest something that I haven't thought of?