Sunday, November 2, 2014 at 03:07PM This is a snapshot of a new drawing "Vanitas 3" I started a few weeks ago. I haven't been able to find time to work more on this, so this has been in this underdrawing stage for a while. This is going to be the first 1/2 of a dyptich piece.
Sunday, August 17, 2014 at 11:36PM Working on the black fabric. I am using this masking fluid and it's a great product. It dries fast, it is easy to peel off and doesn't damage the surface. It lifts off the graphite a little but that's not a big deal. I can touch it up fairly easily. This masking fluid along with painter's tape allows me to create really clean edges. A couple of more days of working on the background, then this piece will be finished.
Sunday, August 10, 2014 at 07:22PM I had to teach a photo workshop to high school students for a week and my work on this piece slowed down a bit. Now I am back on track. I have completed the pomegranate and I am in the middle of rendering the fabric. Naturally it is one of the most time-consuming subjects to render. I am not completely happy about the way the left half of the fabric under her lower body looks in my original reference photo. So I am going to collage that part of the fabric from a different shot taken during the same photo session. The pictures below are just quick snapshots. I am going to do proper photographing of the piece once it is finished, which I estimate will be sometime next week.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014 at 02:31PM I have finished the figure of Vanitas 2. I struggled with the face a little more than the rest of the body trying to make it look right, and I think I finally got it. Now on to the background.
Thursday, July 10, 2014 at 04:10AM I have nearly finished the lower half of the figure. The large smooth areas like these legs are a little tricky to render, especially when you are working from photographs. If you didn't carefully look at the subtle value shifts, you could end up with the surface that is not too convincing about its 3-dimensionality. Observing subtle value shifts on the surface of the human body and trying to make sense of them is an intellectual game like solving a puzzle. It gives me a chance to recall what I learned about how all the bones and muscles are connected, and to imagine what they are doing under the skin in this particular situation I am drawing.
I think this drawing is compositionally complex and interesting. It has a semi-bird's eye view of the model. The surface she is lying on is basically a flat tabletop, and yet there is an illusion of exaggerated spatial depth created by the conversing edges of the fabric. Then the perception of the space is optically further distorted by the use of a wide angle lens in shooting. The back edge of the table neatly cuts the picture plane at the 1/3 from the top, creating a flat space in the background that doesn't seem to belong to the rest of the picture and stops our expected spatial perception of the typical one-point perspective. There is a nuanced interplay between flatness and three dimensionality, which, come to think of it, is a recurring visual game I have played many times throughout my work in various mediums.