Charcoal/pencil sketches critique

[Aleksandra Klepacka]

Willow charcoal/carbon pencil portrait of a musician Adam Nergal Darski.

I tried to work in layers and force myself to be extra patient to nail the values. I have a tendency to push the lights and darks too far but I’m working on it 🙂
I also have predilection for using very tight rendering together with a more loose scribbly style, I just like the contrast of smooth and rough. Not sure if I like it in this particular portrait but I do like it every time I see it in other artists’ work, hah.

I would appreciate if you could guide me what else I can work on at this stage and point out what my weaknesses are. Thank you very much!

• This topic was modified 4 years ago by Aleksandra Klepacka.
• This topic was modified 4 years ago by Joshua Jacobo.

[Aleksandra Klepacka]

Ee.. I don’t think the 2 pixel attachment that I managed to insert will be helpful, hah. Sorry, my first post here 🙂

 

[Aleksandra Klepacka]

Ah, almost forgot about the tortoise. George 🙂 I followed the same principles as when I was drawing the portrait above. One discovery I made is that it’s easier to control values when I stick with graphite for 95% of time and just give the drawing extra punch when adding darkest darks witch carbon pencil.

[Roman Jaskolski]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>Hello Aleksandra.</p>
<p style=”text-align: left;”>Your work is very good , I like especialy Darski’s face expression. I am an amateur but for me your technique is very good.</p>
Regards

Roman

[Ute Fritzkowski]

Looking very good. Maybe a bit lighter highlights on the portrait, or a bit more contrast. But I like them very much.

[Jan]

I personally like the combination of tight rendering with the looser style. I think it brings personality to your work. I also really like the graphite and carbon pencil used together in the turtle drawing. The tight rendering and detail on the head and foot is beautiful, and you seem to have really directed the eye in this drawing by not finishing every detail (which is something I learned from Chris Legaspi’s videos). You are very accomplished and I’ll be interested to see comments from New Masters Academy instructors regarding what you could do to improve!

[Joshua Jacobo]

Beautiful work! I’m sure we will get to this in a critique video but just at first glance, my advice would be to focus on the major forms as a priority and then let your detail support those visual statements. The details are rendered beautiful but they are taking away from the bigger ideas. Maybe this is your intention but to me, in the portrait of the man the beard is the most important thing, not the man’s face. With the tortoise it’s the scales and not the head of the tortoise.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Joshua Jacobo.

[Aleksandra Klepacka]

Thank you so much, Guys!

Roman, yeah I literally just paused the video when I saw this shot. It’s from the music video “Cross My Heart…”. In the scene he was entirely in the shadow from his hat and backlit. It was hard to execute in a drawing (as Ute pointed out, it would be more interesting with strong contrasts) but I still went for it.. Exactly because of the expression.

Jan, thank you very much! That was the main flaw in my drawings and paintings for a long time (there were and still are many though, hah) I used to render EVERYTHING and everything it was equally important. In a full figure drawing I’d give the eyes and the big toe the same amount of detail and wonder why my drawing look flat 🙃. I’m working on it! Although, I feel that I’m having a hard time trying to leave bits of my drawing rough and impressionistic without making them look sloppy.

Last but not least, thank you so much for your critique Joshua! I do it a lot, I get carried away like that, hah. Also, since I try not to erase anything in the final stages sometimes when I realise I went overboard with details that should be secondary it’s already too late. If I started bringing out the bigger forms again, I’d just ruin the sketch, the paper I use is slightly textured and it doesn’t respond well to going over and over again in one place. Anyway, thank you so much that you replied to my post, means a lot to me!

Kind Regards to all of you, thank you!

Alex

[Aleksandra Klepacka]

I didn’t want to start a new topic just to share another work, I’ll stick with my thread to help keeping the forum nice and tidy 🙂

This one took me a long time to finish not because the process was long but because i started it and then for fear of messing up a good underpainting I abandoned it for two months, hah. I get this sort of blocks quite often that’s why I always work on multiple paintings at the same time.

It’s a still from the series but I modified colors to give it a classical oil portrait feel. The pattern in the background is mostly bristle brush, palette knife and paper towel, hah. I quite like the effect.

What do you think about this one?

Thanks!

[Myriam]

I love it! And I love the other drawings above too. It made me think a lot what you said. My biggest problem is I spend too much time drawing the details until I spoil the drawing. I am sure I’m going to learn a lot seeing your drawings and reading what teachers have to say. I see you as a great artist already. Keep it up!

[Charles Hu]

Very Nice painting! I like the transparency and the opacity in the painting. Good drawing as well.

In the “Paint over” I gave you few suggestion that give more depth to the painting. Alway pay attention to the gesture of the compositions , it help to design shapes and to intergrade them.

Use more different edges, the only soft edge you have was on top yoda’s head. Different edges can also benefit creating depth and focal point to the painting.

 

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