This week I've made plenty of progress in the development of my portfolio for college by sheer determination only; I've finished my Woody Allen and Diane Keaton portrait which I'll be expanding on in just a few lines. I have also been making plans for new and exiting projects - including sculpture, I am not even kidding - and I have actually finished quite a few works, unfortunately all within in school art courses which I haven't been able to document like I usually do with all my works.
Nevertheless, when I get these works into my own hands I will definitely post them for you to see here just to stay updated with the progress of my portfolio - something I need to be thinking about at all times so it'll be a good reflection for me as well. By the time the end of January comes I'm hoping to have a developed portfolio to show colleges as well as my reader base right on this page here. We have that to look forward to!
Before getting too ahead of ourselves, I'll get back to my most recent portrait work. Below you can see where I was left off on Monday this passing week; today we will mostly be going through the development of the female character, Diane Keaton.
Last week I managed to just about finish my Woody Allen - the image looks significantly grainier than it looks to the naked eye, a dumb excuse I am aware of but hey! I'm still quite new to the whole working with pencils medium. Especially with no blender tool I'm still working on finding the true smoothness that a graphite work requires.
I apologize for the yellow nature of some of my images - I often work during the evenings and my lighting is poor at the moment making good pictures difficult to take and I can't afford to stop working until the next day to take a picture and make progress after.
Here you can see I've started working on the values of the female character's face. I start with a 2H pencil, working my way towards darker values instead of blocking in darker and lighter values haphazardly.
I'm going by the same principles as with the male character so instead of repeating myself I'll just jump ahead a few steps where my values on the face are obtained and I can start working on finer details such as the hair.
...And here we go. I've made a good start on the hair work and began working on detail on the face such as the teeth, nose and sunglasses. The face of this character was quite painless, easy and quite enjoyable. I haven't done much drawing of hair so this was a nice experience working on such a thing and I felt like it may not be absolutely perfect but quite often I'm not aiming for the unbelievably realistic representation of images - though maybe I should.
From here onward I keep working on details, values and the process of making the work look smoother overall. Something that struck me as being odd was the proportion of the two heads; the male character has a significantly smaller head than the female character which looks odd to my eye as though the woman is almost a giant in the work. However as the truth lies the male just has a extraordinarily small head - I mean I guess it could be, anyone who has seen Woody Allen in any movie can say that he is quite the compact man.
After a few evenings of work, I've produced the following on the right. The clothes are always a taxing job for me, getting textures right can be a real pain. However, I concluded that I don't want it to be the focal point of the work so it can be a slightly bit more vague than the rest of the work.
Below you can see a closer take on the face of Diane. I used the 2H pencil a great amount in this work, I feel like it is a great tool for making surfaces smoother and it makes working on values much easier than diving straight into darker shades of grey.
Just as a recap and to round off my post before showing the entire work in all its entity I thought that I should do a few reflections on Woody. What I do feel like I failed to do was to smooth-en out his face, I am not happy with the graininess but in my defense Woody was much like my 'dummy' for testing out new ways of drawing and shading that perhaps I should have done before working on him. What can I say, I have little patience for such exercises. I need to get straight to business.
Another challenge in Woody was the texture of his jacket - not at all that it was a difficult pattern or any such thing but I found it difficult to make it look real and I really do still feel like it didn't quite work out as I wanted to. As I said before, I have little patience for working on textures that are on large surfaces and I still need to hone on those skills, and I feel like this was a good exercise to work on those skills.
My final reflections on this work in its entirety would probably be that I quite enjoyed working on it; I enjoy the interaction between the two characters and doing something different I haven't really done before. Of course I have a few regrets in this and that but it was all a learning experience and I can now say that I have one less work to do for my portfolio.
Oh, I also added a little detail to the background to offset all the white, to represent something like.. trees? That's for someone else to decide.
That must be it for today. I mean, it is my Sunday and I have to get another project started so that I have something to talk about next week. I can honestly say that I am ready for something new as much fun as this latest project was. So be ready to tune in for that next week! I think I am going to start posting on Sundays again.. just to keep the routine up for old times sake.
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