Becca And Daniel

Too much swatching, time for some artwork.  I wasn’t feeling up to going the full watercolour today so decided to do my first bit of inktense figure drawing of the year.

In my quest to continue pushing boundaries, I decided to go for a double model phase for the first time.  These are Becca and Daniel, two models I’ve not drawn before.  I chose this pose specifically because of the interesting shapes on view and because I can only see the tops of their heads.

I’m back to my usual style with the inktense pencils: rough pencil outline, rub it out until almost invisible,  inktense pencil shading, wet the pencil starting with important lines/contours/creases.

The best two things about this one are both lessons that I really need to remember.  One is that I’m pretty good at drawing the tops of heads in figure drawing and that if quality of art ever becomes more important to me than pushing boundaries, I should be looking for poses where I can see the tops of heads.  The second is that leaf green results in quite exotic, tanned looking skintones.  Don’t ask me to explain that one.

But overall, this one wasn’t a success.  I made an error in putting quite a hard dark edge between Becca’s right shoulder and arm.  It should have been a faint contour but it’s too dark and has given her a strange shaped back.  I tried to reduce the impact of this error by making other edges in that area that should be darker than the offending edge even darker than they already were.  It’s not made things any better.  And the top of Daniel’s right thigh is stretched up too high and too far to the right.  And I’ve not left any invisible edges in this one, which is a heinous sin.

So this one’s not going in the shop window.  Newcomers to this site should be warned that the quality of my artwork tends to make a slow start each year.