12-06-2020, 05:54 AM
Thought I'd upload some of my sketches from the past couple days. I found that painting by Pedro Americo really interesting and decided to do a value study of it. It kind of reminds me of a baroque painting because of the diagonal, billowing cape. But the manner of the vegetation and background feels pretty typical of nineteenth century naturalism.
I liked how the contour of the subject is never really lost, but it gets accentuated by little patches of lighter value behind it. There's a lot of variety in how things meet the background. It kind of gives solidity to the whole outline without needing to silhouette the whole thing in stark contrast, like is usual in modern illustration where you might have a uniform contrast around a subject, or even a rim light to pop it out.
With the figure drawing I tried to draw the contours related to each other through their flow, while still maintaining the right proportions, and thinking more in mass than just optically copying the blocky shapes. I've run into issues drawing figures from life, where you start blocking it in like a still life, but then the angles will shift a bit when they move, throwing the whole thing off. I also always struggle with moving a gesture drawing forward because loose gesture lines tend to not be very accurate, so further construction on top of them more disregards the gesture than uses it, and then things feel awkward and not related to each other. I think this approach is making a lot more sense, especially if I think of it as the flow of the contour, not gesture in the usual sense of it being an abstract idea of the weight or movement of the figure.
I liked how the contour of the subject is never really lost, but it gets accentuated by little patches of lighter value behind it. There's a lot of variety in how things meet the background. It kind of gives solidity to the whole outline without needing to silhouette the whole thing in stark contrast, like is usual in modern illustration where you might have a uniform contrast around a subject, or even a rim light to pop it out.
With the figure drawing I tried to draw the contours related to each other through their flow, while still maintaining the right proportions, and thinking more in mass than just optically copying the blocky shapes. I've run into issues drawing figures from life, where you start blocking it in like a still life, but then the angles will shift a bit when they move, throwing the whole thing off. I also always struggle with moving a gesture drawing forward because loose gesture lines tend to not be very accurate, so further construction on top of them more disregards the gesture than uses it, and then things feel awkward and not related to each other. I think this approach is making a lot more sense, especially if I think of it as the flow of the contour, not gesture in the usual sense of it being an abstract idea of the weight or movement of the figure.