Today was the third day of my week long drawing workshop with Juliette Aristides, and the second session of the drawing I started yesterday.The photo above was taken about halfway through the day. You can see I completed the contour drawing of the hand and lower arm, which I left blank yesterday. The rest of the day I spent filling in the values.
I'm much more comfortable with this part of the process, I tend to think on tone instead of line naturally. But this process is still far more detailed than I usually work.
Instead of developing all areas of the drawing at once, like I have always been trained, we're being told to work on sections at a time - there's really no other way to do it. I am using vine charcoal sharpened to a fine point, almost as thin as a pencil point. And the paper is big - lots of space to cover.
Juliette instructed us to start by focusing on the core shadows (the darkest, middle part of the shadow as it falls across a curved surface) before we start filling in midtones and transitions.
The shot below is from the end of the day, you can see I've started filling in the midtones.
The hardest part of this drawing is by far the knees. They face almost directly at me. I haven't captured them believably yet, but I have two more days to try. It's tough anatomy to work out, lots of small edges of bones and tendons making their shadowy mark on the surface of the skin.
The hand is going to be hard, too. It's further along than yesterday, after I erased and redrew it about 8 times. But the tonalities will prove whether I have drawn a hand, or merely a rubber glove full of sticks and marbles.
Sorry for the bad photos.