Session #006, Work #006
This was a painting where I focused completely on drawing as accurately as possible and nothing else.
The “envelope” a term used by Ted Seth Jacobs and Anthony Ryder, two superb draftsmen, is the process of measuring to get the basic outlines of the subject in very simple angles. This will later be refined into a more accurate outline of the subject. I followed the Charles Bargue drawing course technique of setting up plumb lines, getting the outer most points of the subject, and horizontals for reference.
I spent a long time on getting this as correct as I could. As you can see it is a bit off but very close.
At this point I think I’m about an hour into the painting and it was torture to keep drawing that long and skip all the fun block in stuff. But at this point I relented and began my block in. Unfortunately I started blocking in with my lightest colors. I really should have started with the shadows and used the canvas as my lighter areas until I had all of the darker areas done. Another part of this stage that I really didn’t do well is defining the shadows by drawing them first. Overall, and compared to the last painting, the drawing here is a thousand times better.
This one really shows that I did much better than the last painting with the drawing, but there are still issues. There are a few internal width issues, and these caused a height issue after I adjusted the width of the castle so the internal widths would look correct.
Here I wanted to compare some of the angles that I measured to see if they are correct. I thought I had some trouble with angles in the past but here I can clearly see that these angles are spot on.
Drawing is the most important part of my art, if it is not close to perfect the painting will fall apart. Spending much longer on drawing really paid off. If the painting is dry by tomorrow I’m going to do a wash over it and begin to fix any drawing issues. If it is not dry I’m going to pull out the figure I was painting previously and apply these same drawing techniques to it. I need to hone my drawing skills to the utmost perfection, this is imperative and if I have to spend a year doing nothing but focus on this, then so be it.
