Friday 27 May 2011

Middle Aged Red

...is the name which came for this self-portrait before I actually began it this evening.

The thing about drawing from life, for me anyway, is that although it's easy enough to begin a drawing and make rapid progress with it, it's more difficult to progress with that drawing, to refine it without killing the spontaneity, which is the breath of a drawing done from life


There's about an hour and half or so in this drawing, with lots of stops and starts. I like it, but it's raw, which my drawings often are. Should I try to refine it tomorrow evening? I think it would be a mistake to spend hours worrying away at the drawing for the sake of it, this would certainly ruin the thing. My other choice would be to make another drawing following the same routine, i.e. on heavy smooth water colour, stained with red acrylic ink which I dabbed at with tissue paper to give it some texture and movement, leave it to dry then work first in hard graphite pencil, then coloured pencil (red) then Chinese white and a Derwent Graphitone pencil to create the shadows that are necessary to give the drawing some weight, and to make it look like me! As my face has a lot of shadow in it. So I've always thought.

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