This week I am experiencing the benefit of focusing on the big impression, and probably the practice in the Bargue room is paying off somewhat.
When I draw or start to draw, I try to think what would represent the impression better. This somehow leads me into working hard to see the light/ shadow shapes. I find myself moving towards a unified drawing much faster. That does not mean complete though. As I work on the drawings, I still need to check my accuracy. The major difference I realized this week is this, on how I find flaws in my drawings.
Before I would look again and again at a line and its' angle before I put it on paper. Not that it is necessarily wrong but it was almost impossible to move forward since I have not much to work with. I was more afraid of putting down lines that are way off. I was also seeing lines instead of the bigger shapes/ forms, the bigger picture. It's funny to talk about this because I really thought that's what I was doing ALREADY. Now I know I wasn't doing it right.
So here's my thought process now with the impression in mind.
When approaching my drawing subject (my English teacher probably just fell off her chair >< ) , I try to see the big shape, that normally means squinting a little. I will quickly mark in the top and bottom, still using sight-sized set up most of the time to start a drawing. However, after the top and bottom marks, sometimes a head height mark, I will quickly block in all important shapes and lines. Then step back, it's normally too wide in parts, look at the whole form and decide where to cut in. At this stage I used to often start checking my heights, point by point. ex. where the waist bends, the bottom of the nose, ankle... these are all still very useful and I do use them a lot, just do that much later. Instead, I started seeing the relationship between 2 shapes. ex. the chest area, mine looks more slanted and bigger; oh the forehead space is way too tall and wide, it also needs to rotate clockwise a little; oh it still does not look like her, ahh, the height of the forehead in comparison to the height of the rest of the face, it's too tall, or the space below the bottom of the nose is too short... something like that, I don't know if you get what I am saying, but it probably all came from seeing shapes and aim for the big impression.
Visit separate blog posts for better images of each project.
Long Pose 03
Bargue 03
Master Study
Anatomy
Portrait Clubhttps://www.colorfulphoenix.com/blogs/news/portrait-club_20170122_t02w02_hilde1-2