"Summer" WIP

A new drawing titled "Summer" is underway. This is likely to be the very last drawing of this year. After going through a few compositional changes, I decided to go with a simple and the most impactful design. This one has many technical challenges: hair, translucent beads, fabric, and that keeps me engaged.

"Azured Memory"

My second drawing for the group show in Tokyo. I had several different source images for this drawing. I tried many configurations of the placement of the model, her facial expression, paper plane, fabric and cropping. I ended up with this very cropped down version. I think this works. I might try a different version of this idea later on.

This was also my second attempt to mix regular and matt graphite pencils in a single piece (after "Spring"). The figure was rendered with matt pencils and the fabric with regular pencils. Since the fabric did not require heavy application of graphite, the whole background stayed not shiny at all, making the transition from the figure to the background more seamless. It worked extremely well.

 

Vanitas 30 finished

For nearly 3 months I worked on this piece on and off, going through several concept and design changes. In the earlier stage, I was over thinking and trying to pile up too many ideas in this piece. Finally I came to the end result that was much simpler and leaner. I am pretty happy with what I ended up with.

Vanitas 30 in progress

I have been working on this drawing since October with many interruptions. I am hoping I can finish this before the end of the year. So far I am happy with what I got. I was initially thinking about a texture filled background, but now I am thinking a simpler background might work better for this...

Vanitas 29 work in progress

I am working on this drawing: Vanitas 29. I have to finish it and ship it to Arcadia Contemporary before the mid August delivery deadline.

Recently I switched pencils from Staedtler to Mitsubishi Hi-Uni. Boy, am I glad I did! I was amazed to find out how smooth MItsubishi pencils are. They are superior to Staedtler. Now I feel that I can have much wider range of values under control when rendering. The calibration is different from Staedtler, but Mitsubishi has a range as wide as 10H to 10B! I haven't used all of them yet, but I really enjoyed the ones I used so far for being very smooth on the paper and not gritty at all. it is much easier to control the values from very dark to very light. I don't think I would ever go back to Staedtler!