Portrait of Leigh
 

I have not had a critique since college some 20 years ago. Doing mostly charcoal these days, but experimenting with other media as well.

Hi Peter,

You really captured a glimmer of her personality, there's a spark in her eyes.. very nicely drawn.

I would suggest watching your edges, especially around her face (the viewers left side). Also, perhaps you can think about simplifiying her hair, see it shapes of light and dark with just of few hints of detail.

Nice portrait. You have good drawing skills but the lighting could be improved. Next time, use a single source of light on your subject...preferably from the upper left.

Thank you both for your comments.

I'll be more careful with varying hard and soft edges. This has been mentioned before. Haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet, though.

The lighting is the standard 'glamour' setup - umbrella light to the left, reflectors to the right and at waist level, hair/kick light slightly above and to the right and back of the subject. I'm still experimenting.

I had another thought about your drawing (or any drawing)...not necessarily an improvement...just something different to try sometime...

Drawing on white paper with a pencil or charcoal is difficult and sometimes produces a "harsh" result because there is no middle tone to work with.

I fiddled with your drawing to show you what it might look like drawn with a sepia pencil on a toned paper. It is much "softer" and the value of the paper creates a midtone that can work for you. Although it doesn't show here, white chalk accents would easily establish the highlighted areas if you choose to do that.

I love the drawings of the Italian Masters of the renaissance who drew with red chalk on toned paper...

Quite a nice drawing. The subtleties of the pose lend an air of sensuousness and glamour. The model's gaze directly outward is arresting and interesting. The viewer cannot help but look back into the model's eyes, and a subconscious dialogue immediately begins to take place. I would note a few areas in the drawing that you might reexamine:

1. The tip of the nose has a "hooked" look, caused by the nature of both the contour drawing and the shading. You have some quite dark shadow lines at the bottom of the nose, but if there's shadow at the edges of the triangular base of the nose, then there will be shadow on the whole base, whereas you've let the light flow all the way around the tip of the nose and down to the face. This moves the tip down and gives it the "hooked" look.

2. The nose is still very wide in the area of the eyes, where we would in fact expect it to be substantially narrower. (I noticed this in some of the other drawings on your website as well.)

3. The tilt of the head makes this hard to spot, but in considering the relative positions of the central facial features, the eye on the viewer's right is noticeably lower than the other one (a difference equal to about the radius of the iris). Compare the line between corners of the mouth to a line across the base of the irises; the two lines are substantially off parallel. (I'm not at all insisting that they be parallel, but if they're a long ways off, there has to be a good, obvious reason.) This is exacerbated by the eyebrow on the viewer's right, which is thicker and not arched as high as the one on the other side. Rather than move the eye itself, I think you could thin and raise that eyebrow a bit, and lower the corner of the mouth on the right side.

4. The jawbone is very long, which is part of the reason that the ear is displaced from the position in which we'd expect to see at least part of the lobe. The length of the jaw is more what we might see in a profile; but it would be a foreshortened distance in this 3/4 view.

5. Because the hair is covering the shoulders, it's difficult to see exactly what the pose is, but the distance from the neck to the top of the arm on the left seems short. If that shoulder is in fact turned toward us (as it appears to be), foreshortening would account for the distance, but even so, the hair wouldn't be falling directly down the lateral side of the arm. Try this: on each side of the figure, hold up a finger to cover half a finger's width of the hair from about the ear level down. Now visualize the shoulder contours and shapes that would become visible if that much hair were "removed".

I agree with Stanka about simplifying the hair. Look at the drawing and squint way way down, until almost every "individual" hair you've drawn disappears. As a value shape rather than a lot of strands, it's no less "hair" and, perhaps paradoxically, it looks thicker, with more body. And as a shape with volume, it will be influenced by light and shadow in the same ways that a more solid form would be.

And that light and shadow is what's missing right now from the drawing over all. Experiment with Karin's suggestion to use a single light source from a relatively high side position. The "glamour" lighting you describe may be fine for glamour photography, but it's deathly destructive of form in drawings and paintings. Part of the reason that there's some trouble with shadows in your drawing (as, for example, on the bottom of the nose) is, I suspect, because you've got so much light on your subject, from so many directions, you're having to invent shadows and shading to force some form into the figure. It's a lot easier and more effective to manipulate the light and then draw what you can actually see.

You're well along. Keep at it.

Steven

Better?
 

Took me a while to get back to this, hope it's an improvment.

Looks like improvement to me!
 

Peter,

I was going through this section of the Forum and since I am drawing a lot right now, was interested in your post.

I see great improvement in your edges and I think you have some good contours going on now. Steven's suggestions were excellent and thoughtful and I think you are remembering all your training from college. (Hehehe - I am digging it up still.)

Good luck. This drawing has got to make us better painters, right?

I love her eyebrows, too!

Thanks for the comments. It's sometimes a struggle to dig up all that information from the past. I plan to see about taking a refresher course sometime in the near future.