Jennifur - Part 1

Wednesday night, I purchased the Art Byte, Painting Fast, Loose, and Bold, by Patti Mollica.  It talked a lot about nailing value in your painting and provided some good examples.  Kat talked about this in painting class a lot.  Since all of this is new, it's helpful to read and see what different people say about the same concept.  It helps it sink into my brain better.  As part of planning her painting, this artist does a simple charcoal sketch of what she is planning to paint.  She makes this sketch with essentially 3 "colors", dark, medium, and light.

I think this will help me slow down to see and document the values better, so I'm giving it a try.  Here is Jennifur.  She came to my friends, with this name.  Yesterday, I did the outline and started with the shading and erasing.  With limited time yesterday, I didn't get far.

Although, I took my time on drawing the outline.  At this point, her face looks more like a lioness or a panther and I'm not sure why.  This is the reason that I need to keep working on my drawing skills and how to "see" things better!

Essentially this exercise is the same as one from my painting class.  At an early class, Kat had us smudge up paper with charcoal, so that you had a background with a medium value.  After that, we drew an apple by layering on additional charcoal for the dark areas and using an eraser to create the light areas.  This was back when I was trying to get my apples to have an apple-like posture and it really helped with getting the shape down.  It also, of course, helped with the value.

If I keep doing this, and I think that I should, I may need to buy different paper.  The stuff I have does not seem to "grab" the charcoal at all.  The stuff that Kat had us use worked much better.