Critique Welcome: graphite portrait

[Richard Martin]

Hi,

I have been doing Ilya’s Russian Academy portraiture course and have just completed this portrait on stretched paper. At least… I think I have finished… how does one know??

 

The main challenges I had with it were the white hairs. How to draw white hair on white paper with graphite? In the end, I was inspired by something Ilya said right at the start of the course, “you can even draw with erasers…” and I drew a dark “underlay” of the hair and then drew the white hair on top with a sharp eraser. It didn’t quite work as well as I had hoped and I couldn’t get the lines as thin as I wanted for the finer hairs.

 

 

[Jan]

Really nice work! I never know when to stop either! I just try to make myself quit on a piece before I ruin it haha. Hair is very tricky to draw! I think you did a really nice job (on the wrinkles too). I love drawing with erasers. I do what you did. I start with a midtone, erase out highlights, add in darks, blend, and repeat multiple times. I use a kneaded eraser mostly, and then I discovered that a Tombow Mono Zero eraser is perfect for adding some individual strands. You might want to try that for the finer hairs. Steve Huston has an Advanced Head Drawing Lesson on hair which I found really valuable. He emphasizes looking for the gesture and the basic shapes. I’m just learning myself, but I hope I could be of some help!

[Carlos Perez]

Hey Richard,  when do I know when to stop? I usually give myself an initial intention, I do ask myself a couple of questions and then write down what I am trying to accomplish with the drawing so i can notice what i’m looking for and stop when I’ve achieved it

I often ask myself

– What do I want to focus on?

-What am i practicing?

-What’s the pourpuse?

-What’s the topic?

I could focus on many aspects ( in this case) of a drawing so with these questions i help myself to settle down an idea of what I’m trying to do and therefore recognize it when I see it

Let’s say i want to draw a portrait.  Here I start choosing my focus,  in this case, I choose to draw a portrait of an old man, i decide that i want people to look at his old wrinkles that surround his eyes.

In this case my intention would be , an old’s male portrait focusing on his eyes and especially his wrinkles, so i would know that my drawing is finished when my drawing depicts the face of an old man and my attention got caught by his wrinkles ( i got that by putting many more details on them).  This meaning that i could decide as well to leave parts of the drawing “incomplete” for example leaving the hair without any detail, that doesn’t mean it’s a wrong drawing because the hair has no details that mean my intention was to focus on another apsect the wrinkles.

In the other hand the initial intention could be the opposite, now i decide to draw a portrait and focus on the white hair and utilizing the “subtractive” technique ( erasing the hair to leave it white) and I’ll focus on the white hair because do want to practice drawing white hair with that way ( that’s the intention i initially I decided to give myself)  so  i could draw the overall basic shapes of the portrait and leave them without any detail whatsoever however i’ll just give the proper details to the hair.

Deciding an initial intention as clear as it could be will  let me know when i have reached my goal therefore when to stop .  This is the rule i give myselg .  I hope it helps you. ::)

[Author]

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