First Chiaroscuro Long-Term

The long-term projects are finally underway. The first two/three weeker for my Chiaroscuro class was a fabric drawing. I was excited about this one, as I mentioned in an earlier blog I love drawing fabric. For all our drawings, there are progression stages that we must go through to reach completion. Learning this process, for the first time here, has been so beneficial for my work. I used to become fixated on certain areas of my pieces, and end up with super detailed portions while other areas had barely been worked out. That caused a lot of proportion issues and an overall disjointedness. Working my drawings through by following these steps I learned allows the piece to be continually changing and developing as a whole.

 

Step 1-3: Blocking In, Refining Form, and Plotting in Shadow Edge

These steps take care of the initial mapping out, measuring, drawing, and more measuring of the subject. I draw super light at this stage so the image that I took of my fabric drawing at this point appeared non-existent on the comp screen.

Step 4: Massing In 3 Values - Light, Sahdow, and Background

This stage takes a while to get used to because much of the line work from steps 1-3 is lost. It's all about over simplifying so that the different values of shadow only read as one dark value.

Step 5: Refining Value Scale

So at this point I should have my background in already... I don't know what I was waiting for. I started smearing the charcoal around with my fingers to tone down the darks, and have it read more like a natural cloth should. I went as long as I could with just using materials to move the charcoal, opposed to adding more... my fingers, chamois cloth, tissue, tortillions (blending stumps)

And finally I finished off by adding my background, putting in missing values, and drawing the details. Fin!