Art and Random thoughts - June 3, 2023
With an art show in New York’s Lower East Side now behind me, I’ve been diving back into some new pieces. This week I took a break from the realm of the fantasy & surreal (a realm, which, much like Narnia, needs to be entered and exited through a complicated network of wardrobes, cupboards, and gaps between the couch cushions), and turned to the subject of the human figure.
This week’s artwork
This week’s work is a trio of portraits of Marceline, a fantastic artist and model, and an excellent collaborator in pursuit of something gilded with a tinge of “noir”. This set was based on a batch of photo portraits that she self-shot for this drawing series. Although portraits are not my typical oeuvre, I enjoy them precisely because they’re different. They let me finesse my technical skills at realism, they evoke a wider range of emotion, and they give me a chance to work with some cool people too.
How it was made
The signature piece of this trio, shown above, was made on 24x18in. Fabriano heavyweight paper. The backdrop was done with a spreading of graphite powder, and most of Marceline herself was done with a Faber-Castell 14b pencil, which is like the Spinal Tap (“it goes to 11”) of pencils. The result was a range of darkness that I’d expect more from charcoal than graphite. The secret tool for getting the smooth tones on her arm and back was a simple wad of paper towel for blending.
Weekly thoughts: Drawing for realism
Sometime in the mid 2000’s I came across the fantastic work of Armin Mersmann and was blown away at the level of realism that could be achieved with simple graphite on paper. I convinced myself to try my hand at it, and failed miserably. Over the years I tried to get better in small steps on one subject at a time— drawing rocks better, drawing trees better, drawing clouds, etc; and then, finally people.
These days there are a ton of really well done portraits all over Instagram and other sites. In many of these cases a well-done portrait can be created with just a good reference photo and a lot of patience. I have a lot of respect for people that can do that well, because one thing I’ve learned when attempting portraits, is if you go for realism and get things just a little bit wrong, you’ll be riding a bus deep into the uncanny valley without a ticket back.
There are some artists out there who have an incredible ability to look at a subject and translate what they see perfectly through their hand and onto a page. I, however, am not one of those artists. I’ve recently gained a new appreciation for the “grid method” of drawing, and while a few might call it “training wheels”, or a “tool for beginners”, I find it makes an excellent tool for focusing. Half the battle of drawing realistically is just putting the lines in the right place as your eye darts between your paper and your reference (and Instagram, Twitter, and email, of course). When it comes to depicting a person, I find this tool to be much more useful than for other subjects. If you draw a tree slightly cooked, nobody will notice, but if you shift one edge of an eye or a lip, you completely change the expression of a person; and if you alter the angle of a nose or a jawline, you end up drawing a completely different person completely. So, when I’m trying to accurately get a person’s likeness onto paper, I think the grid method is extremely helpful.
There are plenty of artists who could probably teach a lot more about this type of drawing than me. But with each piece I try to make the next one better than the last, so here are a few tips I’ve mostly learned myself in the course of doing this:
One lesson I learned early on is to draw large - use a literal large sheet of paper - it gives you a bit more freedom to fudge the small details, because when you step back (or look at it on a small phone screen) the mistakes and the stray pencil marks all disappear, and voila, “realism” appears.
Fingers are such a pain to draw well. Do them wrong and you have 5 small sausages. The subtle shapes of knuckles, the lines of wrinkles, and all the little shadows between them all make a big difference. Same with the highlights and shadows around the edges of fingernails.
One of the most important skills to figure out that made a big difference to me was the ability to perceive all of the subtle shades of gray between the light and dark parts of a subject. A novice artist may just darken the shaded side and lighten the illuminated bits. But look a bit closer and you see that the shaded side also has light and dark parts and the illuminated side has brighter and darker parts as well. But seeing those shades is only half the battle — the other half is putting them on paper.
If there’s one thing that I’d want to improve on still, it would be the subtle details in texture, whether its skin or fabric. This again becomes easier when working on a large scale, and then having the patience to fill in the subtle shades and patterns in a way that looks convincing when you zoom out.
The last thing I’ll say is that there is much more artistic freedom to be had when you’re not going for pure realism. For one thing, going for a more stylized or abstract form steers you away from the uncanny valley problem, and the more stylized or abstract the form, the more distinctive and eye-catching your art might be. Maybe that’s what I should be attempting next…