A Pair of Minutes, continued

Amazing how much work can be accomplished when one sits down, removes distractions, picks up the tools and works for just a pair of minutes! You can see how this very large drawing is nearing completion:

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The right side of the water wheel, brick pavers, some ground cover and a few detailed flowers in the foreground are all that remain. But wait! There’s More! – the final step in all drawings is the “nit-picking”, also known as the refinement stage. This is when little changes are made that cause a significant improvement – darkening the darks, lightening the lights, increasing contrast in the important places, sharpening the edges on some areas and blurring out others.

Gaposis

Back in the day when I used a real camera, a complicated drawing might take 2 rolls of film. Now that the restraint of “wasting film” has been obliterated, I take as many photos as I want! It is such a nice thing to never stop to change rolls. Despite the abundance of images, there are always more needed. That is why there is a large gap in the middle of this drawing.

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Here is the right side so you can see a bit more detail. The stone steps are so beautiful that I forget to admire the (unfinished) river!

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Growth, part five (Facing Faces)

After about 9 years and on the fourth address for cabinart, it became apparent that notecards were fading fast, and the local market for house and cabin commissioned drawings was getting saturated. The next step? Portraits! I had skirted around this subject for years, refusing commissions, terrified of not being able to capture a likeness. This was and is a reasonable fear. If someone pays you to draw Steve, they expect you to draw Steve, not his cousin! Faces are so subtly different; we all have the same components, and yet we most definitely do not look like one another. (However, I do tend to get all the cookie-cutter blondies on The O’Reilly Factor mixed up. . . )

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What to do? This was a brick wall on which I had been bashing my head for years. A wise friend said, “Why don’t you pray about it?” Duh. So, I did. Within the year, the CPSA offered 2 separate workshops on colored pencil portraiture, and the principles definitely crossed over to graphite. I was on my way in portraits! However, this will always be a difficult subject for me; unless I pray through each and every portrait, I do tend to draw the guy’s cousin. The subtle differences can just divert a face from the intended person to a stranger or a distance relative with a slight mis-stroke of the pencil.