For the final project of the Intro to Pencil Drawing class, we once again took the last few weeks to complete a drawing from a cast model. This time I chose a cast of the mouth from Michelangelo’s David statue. In the first round of the class I had complete a drawing of David’s Eye, but for this project, we took extra time and used a wider value scale of about 11 values (the David’s Eye project only used about 7 values). This increased scale helped create a better representation of the model and forced all the students to better understand light, shadows, and halftones, and how all them interact with each other.
This drawing contains some of the darkest shading I’ve done to date. Establishing an accent color, for the darkest areas of the drawing (under the chin), and 3 shadow values really opened up the depth of the shadows and gave the subject more dimension. Plus, the 3 halftone values and 4 light values forced me to see the much more subtle transitions of shadow to light and dark lights to highlights. It made me feel a bit naive, but I was visibly blown away by the typically unforeseen or unnoticed number of plains and plateaus that make up a seemingly flat surface. Each nuanced shade or value represents a different plain on this subject, and even though we had to wrap-up this drawing for the end of the class, I feel like I could have spent much more time adding even more values.
Katya Held advised us to keep practicing over the summer with objects that are a single value or color. That made me understand why I struggle when I try to apply these techniques in a figure drawing workshop – in addition to the tones and values the light creates on a white object, as in the case of the Mouth of David cast, a real human subject adds infinitely more values due to skin tone, hair color, etc. But, I’ve enjoyed trying to apply these techniques to a live subject, and will post some of those results in the coming weeks and months.
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