I’m almost 100% sure that my self portrait is finished. Before I spray it though I’m going to look at it for a day and make sure.
I didn’t think I was going to finish it today but I put in a lot of time and deep focus. This gives me a whole day to ponder any changes before I have to submit it to the challenge by tomorrow evening.
I’m not sure if anyone would understand what I’m trying to communicate in this portrait, but regardless if anyone else “gets it” or not I’m still very happy with the result.
What I’m trying to communicate is the virtues I’m trying to embody as an artist currently. Those are: Diligent, Persistent, Relentless, Authentic and Prolific. Plus my current motivation and feeling of art which is full of motivation and energy.
The forward figure represents the physical me, hunched and intense, working furiously. But the distant figure represents the psychological me full of passion, energy, intensity with a deep yearning to let all the emotion out.
I’m attempting to further communicate these ideas through value and texture in the drawing. The distant figure is light, all in graphite, smooth and airy, like a ghost. But the forward figure is all in charcoal, dark, with hard lines and energetic strokes. It’s very much in the physical world and I even had to physically move while grinding the charcoal into the paper. Whereas the distant figure was done, mostly sitting down with careful rendering.
Hopefully you can see some of that in the detail image below.
The more I look at these images the more I think the self portrait is finished and ready for submission.
The normal 15 minute warm-up in graphite.
The challenges continue with the 250 box challenge. My brain wasn’t up to the task today. I made a bunch of errors on every box. ):
Back to the gesture exercises again. I’m still trying to draw the entire figure at once and was able to achieve some levels of that with a few of the figures.
I sketched my cat asleep, one of my favorite subjects at the moment. Then a lady pushing stroller holding a cute puppy that we saw yesterday while picking blackberries.
After a ton of work and focus in just a few days I may be calling my newest self portrait finished.
I’m not really happy with the structure of the fist seen in the distant figure of my self portrait.
Once I get back to working from Steve Hustons book I’m going to spend an extra amount of time working on hands in multiple positions.
