it's morning, on a tuesday. i will be starting my sessions with students soon. normally, by my cycled routine, i usually write in this blog sometime in the evening. but for some reason, the way things turned out, i'm writing this now, in the morning.
not much to report. i think i'm doing better with my drawing. it used to be difficult to draw faces, still is, frankly, but i think i'm getting better at it. in particular, a difficulty is, for some reason, making eyes symmetrical. well, not exactly symmetrical, because when you really look at and draw eyes, you find that they are anything but... but what i mean is, drawing eyes so that they "look right," and look true. when i do a face, i usually go on something of a journey. i notice in the last portrait that i drew, i started somewhere in the neck, then went up to the lips, then one side of the nose (usually the shadowed side, because it provides me more shapes to work with), and then one eye (usually the right eye, right from my perspective, not the right eye of the actual face)... and then i started to begin the right forehead... it's only then that i begin to attack the left side of the face, sometimes from the bottom up, sometimes from the top down... the left eye is a test. if i can pull off making it "look right", then the entire face is imbued with a sense of realism...
i guess i'm always doing what they call a contour drawing, that is, drawing edges. but if you really think about it, there are edges to almost everything. sure, there are edges that are soft, and those are difficult to capture via a line. but you can basically draw the shape of, say, a shade of color. that's what i do. it's how i "capture territory" when i draw... eventually, i would like to explore color, but that seems it's own empire. right now, i just do a passing job at capturing what they say are values. that is, i put more weight or darkness on certain things, and less on others. the most fun is keeping things white. if there is so much brightness as to make things indistinguishable, then the best thing to do is to leave it alone. sometimes, there's a magic in this. for example, in the most recent portrait i did, there was a reflection on the iris, so much so that it would not have been true to the image to draw the edge of the iris. so instead, i left the edge out, and almost made the reflection an extension of the white cornea. but the overall impression was that that blank space that i had put in was a reflection of light. i guess the eye understands and translates the image appropriately- if you are true to what you draw.
i wish writing were similar...
oh well, it's about 9:25, so i'm going to set up my meeting with my first student... be back later (maybe).
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