The meat of things

On Thursday we went back over our drawings to prepare for next Tuesday's critique.  I needed to improve my portrait of Megan and thankfully she was able to pose for 20 minutes.  I cranked out different hair and more accurate face.  The first time she posed in class for us she was wearing a pony tail which arched up in back of her head but this time it was down framing her head.  Unfortunately I decided to take down the pony tail and work with the current hair style in my drawing.  I should have left it, as the new hair didn't work in my drawing and ended up being too voluminous.  I was able to improve her mouth which was too dark and highlighted around the edges.  Working with her eyes I saw that they where not lined up right and tried to conceal them with hair so I wouldn't have to go into the hassle of doing more detailed work.  Realizing that the hair really wasn't working I took my eraser and tried to sculpt it to create more space around her head and to create some highlights.  The neck was too elongated so I shortened it and pushed her hair around it to create a more relaxed look.

Paul, Evan, and Megan needed to work from me so I posed for the next forty minutes.

We drew the difficult angle portrait of Evan sitting on the floor working on his laptop (lucky him) on Tuesday.  I started out with a quick warm up sketch on my newsprint pad to get an idea how the angles looked.  More often then not the angles are a lot more severe then I originally put down on paper so I tried to measure this time to get a more accurate framework.  I was happy with the quick sketch so began on the final version with arches paper.  Working with 2b graphite I quickly layed out the angles and important areas of the face again though I struggled with where I should build the foundation to which other structural parts of the face would follow.  The eye brow for some reason took precedence over everything else because it was the closest thing to me.  After this I built on the bridge, eyes and nose.  His head was extremely difficult to get the correct idea of its roundness from looking at it on top.