All in the Family

After drawing class Thursday morning, I was pumped and a little art-intoxicated as I lunched in the car en route to the dental office.  I was only able to attend 3 of about 12 classes during the first three month section, and poppin in for the last class I saw in the way of a time lapse how much everyone else improved!  It gave me hope!  And then gave me a swift kick in the pants.  

Sigh.

I was feeling left in the dust.

Thanks Mila the Cat for helping me feel through the blog this morning, perfect timing.

I have simply got to find a way to make more time for this… Working on it!

Regarding my last exercise, Benito round 4, Terry's crit commended some progress in realizing depth and awareness of the 'big sculpt', for which I was relived to hear.  The major issue with it was that I tried to push the depth a little too far and made the darks too dark.   Terry lays it out, "One of the fundamental rules of representational light and shadow relationships is that between light and shadow of a shared surface, you can have a big value jump or you can have a big color jump (temperature shift), but you can't have both."  So I made a big value jump but did not keep the light and shadow colors in the 'same hue family'.  I remember reading this excited to take it into the next study, and then I stepped back and looked at the result of that next study.  I may have done it again.  

Study of Sorolla's Santiago

(in progress)

About 1.5 hours later

The forehead is convincingly sculpted, but temporal shadow describing the left edge seems flat like a crack in the clock tower with the bit of light behind it too light and not falling back.  While the ears feel like they are pushed back, there is no feeling of side planes curving back to meet them and the nose is not popping.  So, this must mean the edges of the nose are too hard.  The eye sockets seem to have light on the upper lids where they should be in shadow.  In an attempt to redraw the mouth I got the darks too cool again!  From the in progress pic it looks like I started with barely a value difference between light and dark, and then I must have over compensated.  The shadow along his left side is a big value jump to the 'too dark side' and possibly too cool as well.  Sometimes I feel like I am taking a step back in results but there is definitely much more happening in my head!  This is definitely going to pay off!  Some day.