[Jeanette Assies]

Day 23: charcoal on paper. This one has been one road of frustration. I have struggled tremendeously with the buttocks. Can you imagine? I find myself in more cases struggling with the correct gesture. I think the approach of starting with masses does need a gestural drawing to start with. New focus point for my coming drawings.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 22: charcoal on grained paper. Today I found myself again fiddling with this drawing too far. I think an earlier stage of this drawing was better.  I am still indecisive on how far I want to detail the light planes. Actually the objective is not to detail the light planes at all, so that will be my focus for the coming 78 drawings.

[Jeanette Assies]

Hi Myriam, thank you for your nice feedback. I can see you already heading to drawing less and shaping in masses more. FYI, I am member of NMA for my 5th year now and it is only the last 4 weeks that I am taking a different approach in drawing. Like you, I felt my drawings were too detailed and too much worked out. I can give you only 1 advice: keep doing these daily drawings and you will grow into a more mature artist who does not feel like detailing everything. It is all about experience, so draw draw draw! As for charcoal, my experience is try to seperate the ligth planes (the planes in the light) from the shadow planes first. The shadow should be very dark, almost black and the light planes, keep them white, no charcoal. After that you can manipulate the shadow planes a bit with touching it very very very lightly with your fingers on the edges where light meets shadow. You create a kind of half tone like that. Do not add any more charcoal on the light planes untill you are more used to the medium. Otherwise it will get too grey in the light planes and that flattens your drawing.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 21: pressed chalk and conte a paris on grained paper. Today I experimented with a new paper and changed medium. Not to happy with the result. I find myself doing more of drawing rather then massing in when I use conte a paris. Also it is a bit to renaissancy for my taste, so I expect to go back to charcoal tomorrow.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 20: charcoal on paper. This drawing I kept to 30+ minutes, but I feel like developping it further into a more finished state. But for the sake of this challenge, I post it as-is……

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 19: charcoal in my multimedia sketchbook. A small sketch of 40 minutes that I could squeeze into my busy schedule of my break-away-from-home-in-corona-times. It is a sketch of 8 by 6 inches, so the details of the hands were quite difficult. I left it with 40 minutes, but could have spent hours of further fiddling.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 18: charcoal on paper. The coming 4 days will be a challenge to post everyday since I am on a little break. Nonetheless managed todays challenge. I tried to incorporate the critique of Iliya. The face was an hassle so I left it more undefined then I wanted to.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 17: charcoal on paper. This one was hard to do with the approach of massing in the shadows, since the figure is mostly in light. Found a little bit of shadow shapes and other I tried detailing the light shapes cobined with linework…..

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 16: charcoal on paper. Again it took me more then 30 minutes. I fiddled around with the light shapes and made things only worse. I am happy with the drappery though. I like that quality of charcoal.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 15: charcoal on drawing paper. Happy with the bottom part, not too sure about the breast and head part. Maybe I should have left the head less defined……

[Jeanette Assies]

Hi Iliya,

thank you so much for your feedback. I was totally not aware that you are THE Iliya, instructor at NMA. I love your lessons so much. They have really been a game-changer for me. Question, if I may, on your remark in the picture: you state “shadows are generally flat”. Do you mean that that is a rule of thumb, or are you critiquing my aplication of shadow shapes, which are generally flat? Hope you can help me to clarify this remark, so I can use your critique in my future drawings.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 14: charcoal on drawing paper. I think I found my love in charcoal on paper. Such a volatile medium, I am just so enjoying this! I have kept it till 30 minutes and am experimenting with not so detailing everything so much. Try to keep more areas undisclosed, so to say.

[Jeanette Assies]

Sure did see Iliya’s critique, Joshua. Very usefull! I am utterly gratefull for his feedback.

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 13: charcoal on smooth drawing paper.

I used a different approach for this. I massed in a few black shapes and kind of sculpted the figure out of the black masses. In the previous drawings I massed in the shadow shapes by following the outline of the shadow shapes. That way I could achieve more accuracy within 30 minutes. This drawing therefor took about 2-3 hours. More time but quite an enjoyable experience and I learned a lot!

 

[Jeanette Assies]

Day 12: so I switched back to charcoal on regular smooth drawing paper.

I really like working with that. Gives me so much joy and I get a lot done in only 30 minutes. For this one I restricted myself again to 30 minutes only. It is a challenge to get all the key areas done (thank you so much Iliya for your usefull feedback!), but hey I have 88 days left to improve on that!

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