Jeff’s Blog

I’m feeling a little tired today (didn’t sleep well at all last night, and I have no idea why), but I still managed to spend about 30 minutes this evening on the Manet copy.

I wanted to start with the darkest darks first, so I can judge everything else against that baseline.  I used an 8B pencil and a blending stump for the darkest parts of the jacket.

I have a little work to do to fix the face, but I was pretty sure that if I tried that tonight, it would just make things worse.  I’ll save that for a night when I’m feeling a bit better.

Based on my progress tonight, I’m guessing I have another 3 1/2 to 4 hours of work remaining.  I must keep this in mind and not let myself fall into the trap of hurrying through just to get it done.  I can almost hear my high school art teacher’s voice in my head: “quality takes time”.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how I’d like to develop my drawing style. As much as I admire the photorealistic work that some people can achieve, and as much as I’d like to get to the point that I can achieve that myself, I think I’d rather focus on developing a painterly style. What better way to develop that style than to copy a few paintings?

This is a work by Manet that I’m copying from an image on my laptop.

So far, I’ve put a grid on the paper (just in case you haven’t noticed), and laid out the basic composition. It took a little over an hour to get to this point.

It’s interesting, because I thought the grid would actually speed up the process. Instead, it only served to point out how far off my drawing is. This is one of the few drawings that I’ve actually pulled out an eraser — I usually just massage the drawing to fit with whatever I happened to lay down. The grid, I guess, serves as the drawing police: “You are out of line! Get back!”

Original by Manet

This is also my first multi-day drawing. I usually do whatever I can in one sitting, mainly because I don’t want to let all my stuff stay out, taking up space on the dining room table or kitchen counter. Working from a picture helps with that.

Stay tuned…

(For reference, I’ve also included a picture of the original)

Laughter is one of those things that everyone understands, no matter the language. Even the deaf laugh the same as the hearing. No particular point here. Just sayin’…

This was inspired by a photo posted on thing-a-day.  It also fits nicely with Everyday Matters challenge #53 (Draw a mouth).

The drawing was done entirely with a mechanical pencil (along with a blending stump) in my sketchbook. I can’t seem to get those deep, deep darks with some of my softer drawing pencils (baffling); so even though it takes a little longer, the mechanical is quickly growing on me. It took me about an hour for those keeping score.

Until tomorrow… laugh.