What a gorgeous, though slightly chilly fall day it has been today!
As most of the county knows, tomorrow the midterm elections are taking place in the good old United States and all the over 18 year-old's should be getting ready for voting tomorrow much like I should. But I am not unfortunately due to my own stupidity of missing the registration deadline by two lousy days. This newly turned 18 year-old will not be fulfilling her civic duty this time, oh well...
Instead of moping around about it I've decided to utilize my time and my day off tomorrow to make some good progress for my portfolio. I started on a new project, a portrait in fact, with Diane Keaton and Woody Allen - a couple that used to be seen quite often in Woody Allen's productions. See, I am a humongous fan of Woody's work and I find it difficult to fathom how someone could not like him led alone not know him! He is a complete classic in all his glory.
So, on the left you can see my 'model' picture though I decided to bring the two closer together and make a few alterations here and there just to keep it interesting. Below you can see I began my preliminary sketching, getting the basic figure down before blocking anything in or making any further alterations. I actually began this work a few months ago before I got too busy to do my art so this week I've been getting back to it and made quite a bit of progress for the short whiles I get to work on it.
After drawing out my preliminary sketch, I decided to begin on the male figure, Woody, which I later realized to be a dumb mistake since I am right handed and working from left to right might later smudge the character on the right when working on the left side of the work. This issue is of course resolved simply by using a blank sheet of paper to cover up the finished parts of the work so that my hand won't smudge while working.
I start my work by shading in the basic values that I'm in need for the different parts of the image and slowly start shaping in the broader details before getting into the nitty gritty.
As I said before, I started working on this piece a few months back and I actually only began working the shoulders and the clothing of the character on the right, which I want to fix completely now since I feel as though I didn't do a very good job at it. I decided to start on the face this time instead and work my way down from that and attempt to make fixes later than sooner. Ha.
I guess at this point while I'm at it when I started working on this piece I decided to boycott the smudging tool completely since colleges do not like to see the use of them in students' portfolios and besides, I rather learn blending values the hard way rather than starting with 'cheating' - if you will - from the git go.
The next stop after blocking in my general values is to start working on detail and darker values, as you can see above I've colored in the glasses and used stronger colors to create more contrast and depth. However, I still need to create more contrast and smooth-en out my colors by filling in with my 2H pencil, a useful tool for such a hard pencil. From here on I keep on filling in the colors, especially in the hair area, which will be my next task.
On the left you can see my current work desk, it's quite small and uncomfortable compared to my old, big wooden desk that was more like a work surface instead of a desk - man, I loved that thing. However, I have my jam working ensuring complete inspiration and motivation for hard work on my latest project!
Below you can see a close up on the right character only, since we are not focusing on the left hand character just yet. You can see that first of all I've darkened the hair on the character along with adding and distinguishing highlights from which we can see the curly nature of his hair. Second, I've made the texture of the face more smooth and even, despite the slight graininess to the bottom of the face which I will have to work on further.
What I do really need to fix is the clothing of the character. That cannot stay the same way much longer - as it will not. It's funny, because at the moment I actually do feel like I'm getting more of a Lou Reed vibe instead of a Woody Allen, probably indicating that I should look closer at the original image and start reworking some parts to make it look more correct but knowing myself I only like the fact that it doesn't look exactly like the image, as long as it looks real.
I hate to say it, but that is all that I have for the moment. It is probably the best anyway, my posts are getting longer by every post, I should learn to restrict myself. All I can say is, stay tuned in to see more progress, I will be working hard on this project and the ones too come so I will probably keep posting with fewer breaks than I had let myself do before.
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