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akarudsan — Live sketch Nicole
#charcoal #girl #portrait #traditional #traditionalart
Published: 2018-05-15 01:43:11 +0000 UTC; Views: 380; Favourites: 61; Downloads: 0
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Facebook || Instagram || Reddit || BuyMeACoffeeLive sketch of my youngest daughter. She was sitting on a chair posing for me...but she is just 7.5 years old so she can't sit still for long periods of time...Well, it was tough but still managed to draw he somewhat.
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Comments: 19
Kids and pets always moving around. Challenging. Sometimes the best is to make some thumbnail notations from observation - gesture, eyes, facial expression - then put them together later when there is time to play with it.
Values of the face contrast starkly with the half-tones looking muddy in the dark and dirty in the light. Basically, the half-tones disappear, because they are not well decided. That is, they cover too great a range and tend to merge with each other, or grade, but not in a disciplined way. They need to be simplified, or broken down into one or two discrete tones in order to do the job of describing form, on one hand, and substantiating a definitive tonal scheme, on the other.
The tonal scheme of the shirt is light and half-tone framed by dark, which is highly effective, partly because the tones are limited/simplified.
Tonal scheme, which is entirely under the control of the artist, is considered the most important element of composition. It's the foremost cue to the center of interest (which usually is marked by the highest level of contrast in the picture) and provides the main design for reading the picture. Test the tonal scheme using the "postage stamp" test by reducing the picture to "1x1" or the size of a postage stamp to see how it reads. Or squint to blur all detail so that only the tonal variations show. Do the grays stand out as they should? Or do they blend together in a bad way (i.e. doe they collapse the grounds)? Does the background frame the foreground? Or does it compete with it to flatten the three dimensional illusion?
One word about placement and canvas division: avoid even/symmetrical divisions of canvas. Here the placement tends divides the canvas in half, with the head dominating the top half, the chest the lower.
Sure - the exercise is about capturing likeness, not composing. But as soon as it's out there, there is no escaping the effects (positive and negative) of composition. My points, then, are not to push you into fine points of composing; they are to familiarize you with specific rules of thumb -conventions - to minimize distractions in the presentation. If it gets tedious , or obnoxious, let me know. 
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Quite honestly I was and still is not even remotely satisfied with this sketch: the tones, the likeness - everything is messed up. It was like one of those days where nothing works for you. The only reason why I kept on going was that my little one asked me to draw her because then she was going to draw something on her own. So, all fair points, which I actually know about, including symmetry, tones, using squint method or small thumbnail (or like taking a picture of your drawing with a cell and then looking at it that way) - all of these things I normally employ in my drawings to test things out but it doesn't mean I actually successfully implement the changes from these tests 
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If you notice I don't post a lot of good stuff. haha. I'm more interested in the process, because one learns more from failure than success. The idea is not to show off strengths; it's to turn weakness into strength. How can one do that, except by working through weakness? It's good that you persisted!
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Yeah, she was tired to pose and I had trouble capturing her face for some reason...
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Random question. How long does a sketch like this take for you?
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I didn't time it but this one took about 20 minutes.
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