Skull Drawing Session 4, Finished

Yay!! Not only am I caught up with my daily posts with this post but I’ve also finished my skull drawing. I think I could have cut this down into two or maybe even one session but I do what I can do daily and that is what is important.

It only took me an hour and a half to finish this up and again I took my time moving from one small plane and value to the next working hard to get the drawing just perfect. For some reason though the drawing is off, I keep measuring and measuring but it still seems that the drawing of the skull needs to be a bit more tall. But, when I measure it in multiple ways it comes out correct. So either my perception of correctness is off or I just don’t know how to measure..

No matter, when I look a the setup photo below the drawing looks pretty darn close so I guess I’ve just been too close to the drawing too long.

I really like that I was able to get this super dark value with the Conte charcoal pencils, it took a while to constantly massage the charcoal into the newsprint but after several passes I ended up with a very dark and very flat black.

So what did I learn from doing a long term and very detailed drawing of the skull? Well, for one I learned that drawing the teeth in detail is probably the most difficult. You have to observe them so closely just to get ever width and height just correct or they look weird. Even now I don’t think I got them as correct as they should be. They don’t feel as though they are protruding forward, and now that I look at the photo I see that the value of the back teeth should be lower to push the front teeth of the skull forward.

Another thing that I learned is that you can’t rush this at all, you have to be slow, I had to mentally slow myself down many times. You also have to be aware of your mood and if your rushing or not. I’m wondering if our current culture of fast pace everything is effecting the way I work, no, I’m not wondering anymore I know for a fact that I find it very difficult to focus on anything for a long period of time without getting bored. I constantly read about artists taking days, months and even years to finish one piece and I still think that spending a few hours on one of my works is too long. Slowly, I’ll work on my patience in drawing.