Poetry's drawings and stuff

Done for now, couple of notes made as well for it:

• Accuracy: I was off from the reference by quite a bit in terms of skull structure and scale of the relative components of the body. My issue is that in the initial line drawing I didnt take into account big masses and moved left to right referencing the headscarf to the wall, the right eye socket to the headscarf, the nose to the right eye socket etc. This lead to compounding mistakes of measurement which resulted in a differently shaped skull. Instead I should've blocked in the entire thing first, made sure the big shapes were correct and then moving in with detail. I also have a tendency to magnify or draw-too-large anything I'm looking at (e.g. the gems at first). Color accuracy was much better but tbh its one of my stronger points.
  
  
• Edges: The concept of a line lay in is interesting to me. I realised when trying to convert the photoreference to a line drawing, when I focus on any "line" im really just choosing an edge of the original to keep in my drawing. When I squint I can see other edges, i.e. other choices, such as shadows within shadows and finer detail. This same concept of edge priority, or what lines matter the most relate really closely with the painting stage. Not only do edges form the demarcations of light and dark, but also colour, texture, I can represent so many different edges with the same line. This also explains to me just why those charcoal figure drawings with the blocked in shadows appeal to me so much. The edge of the shadow is exaggerated, but the artist has chosen the most important edge and as such it reads really clearly to me even though the shadow itself is flat; the lower priority edges arent included.
  
  
• Detail Priority: The reference was aids. I chose it because I wanted to push myself into detailed work and being more accurate with photostudies. I tend to not do them because I get discouraged by them as I rarely match the reference. As its such a complex painting, when I was done I realised that if I turned it to BW and bumped the contrast to max, I could get a sense of where the areas of greatest light/dark contrast were, which as I know from Optom school is one of the biggest draws to our visual system and something we very heavily rely on to process visual imagery. The comparison is attached. Looking at the jaw jewelry just highlights to me how important the dark areas are as well as the actual metal. Painting the jewelry was probably the hardest part of the whole painting as everything I did felt wrong until I realized that I had to paint with almost black and put heavy dark shadows between the gems and glitns and then blend the shadows out. It then became a measure of making the actual metal pop by using lighter colors and very bright glints. The execution is sloppy in a lot of points but I think the best examples would be the around the all the blue gems, as well as the right jaw-green gem's silver petals/wings. Everything else looks tacky and plastic in comparison.
  
  
• New Tools: Instead of the standard flat brush I use with pressure dependent blending and variable texture. I used 3 main brushes, a 100% opacity pen with pressure dependent size to lay down blocks of colour, the standard sai brush at 100% to "push" colour from one side to another and manual painting of textures stroke by stroke, and a standard sai watercolor brush at 100% for soft blending that you can see in the background and cloth. I found this setup a really good return to basics because I actually had to think more instead of going on autopilot with the one brush, there was a different approach to every main material and it felt more like I had to manipulate colours on a page and plan my strokes ahead instead of my normal process of spamming the brush til it clicks and then varying colour over the top. The skull especially was difficult to get from the block in stage(3) to its current texture, I ended up using hatching brush strokes to easily build a roughed up appearance and then focused on using the hard pen tool to nail in larger bumps. The water tool was also dank as I used it a lot to sort of, draw out shadows, or give them this soft while still varying detail. I think I'll be using these tools more as they feel like less of a crutch.
  
  

Comfy Quick Doodles:


Sketchbook Pages: