[Natasha]

No 40. The muses graced me with their favor! I don’t know, I just like how this one turned out. I didn’t want to use a pen (pen seems to work on masculine forms better for me) but I also wanted a challenge so I worked the entire portrait with my mechanical pencil and almost no blending (plenty of erasing though).

[Natasha]

No 39. Expressive faces with lots of folds are so much easier for the pen. I find a cheap bic works best for controlling the strokes, to make them lighter or heavier as needed.

[Natasha]

No 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40

It’s weird how some days I can pull from all my learning and put together a great portrait, and then the very next day it’s if I can’t do anything right. I think it is this fluctuation that marks an amateur.

35: I resort to pencil when I’m really crunched for time, but I’m still trying to reduce physical blending and work more with developing subtlty directly from the pencil. This time I was also exploring some cross-hatching with the eraser.

36: Back to pen and trying not to lose my patience. Since there’s no erasing it involves a lot more from the prefrontal cortex and planning ahead.

37: Can you tell when I rush? Yes.

38: Experimenting again. I wanted to explore completely straight lines for shading. . . no curving across the form. It’s a lot more playful and I thing that is conveyed in the drawing.

[Natasha]

No 34. I have always had an aversion to charcoal…it’s so messy, out of control, unforgiving…until now. This is the most fun with charcoal I’ve ever had. I worked hard to follow Iliya and mass in the general shapes first with big swipes of charcoal. Towards the end of the demonstration, I was no longer following along and just watching his subtler development. This particular portrait differs from my others in that this one is 18×24…much larger than the others in my 7×10 sketchbook.

[Natasha]

No 32 and 33.

[Natasha]

No 28, 29, 30, 31 just truckin’ along. Like I mentioned before, I’m actually on number 5o something so I’m trying to get caught up here. One thing I’ve been working on is trying to accomplish more with pencil/pen strokes than with blending. That’s why switching to pen has been hard but the challenge has been fun. The fourth image here was a speed run and I probably spent no more than 20 minutes on it.

[Natasha]

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this but still could not achieve the sensitivity to the subject matter that Iliya does. Laying so much shading at the beginning is wildly different than I’m used to so requires a leap of faith. The good news is that I’m starting to understand the planes of the head a lot better.

[Natasha]

Sweet! His lessons are on my to-do list.

[Natasha]

Digital painting always amazes me. Good work!

 

[Natasha]

Oh wow! When I did this project, I was completely overwhelmed by all the detail. You did a great job!

[Natasha]

You make it look so easy! Beautiful work. Makes me want to change courses.

[Natasha]

Here I’m trying to recreate what I learned in Iliya’s course while it’s still fresh, but it’s easier to copy a master than to apply it to your own work. I’m hoping practice will somehow make it sink in. I’m still amazed at how Iliya disappears his lines and shortcuts his reflected light.

And then I decided to try a mixed-media aaaaaannnnnnd *pfft…..disaster. I really messed up on the neck. No 24

No 25. Getting back on track. When I’m super busy, I resort to pencil because I can whip it out much faster.

No. 26. I wanted to explore some different lighting and thought some backlighting would be a nice challenge.

 

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Natasha.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Natasha.

[Natasha]

Slowly, slowly getting through the Russian figure course. There’s something not quite right about her but I can’t put my finger on it and I can’t seem to capture that magic that Iliya adds to his drawings.

[Natasha]

No 21. I just had to talk about this one because it was before I had gotten to Iliya’s neck and shoulders demonstration. And though I still haven’t memorized the names of anything, I can see what’s wrong, especially with the clavicles. So it is sinking slowly in. Makes me want to go back and rewatch that lesson.

[Natasha]

Forgive me while I try to play catch-up. I’m actually on day 50 of the challenge! I just decided really late in the game to start posting here. This is 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Two steps forward, one step back, am I right? lol

The first one is pencil, then two in pastel, pencil again (a copy of John Singer Sargent’s…I was trying to see if I could match his cross-hatching), and lastly, pastel again but I was forcing myself to not blend and describe the form with the weight of the strokes.

 

 

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