Week 16 - Renaissance and the Golden Dutch Age. Focus on Portrait

 For Week 16 's task, we had to produce a portrait in charcoal. This was quite a challenge for me, since I rarely used charcoal before and never really enjoyed it. The challenge was backed up by my unfortunate choice of material, the pages of my sketchbook too glossy for the charcoal to adhere to. Even so, I did my best to recreate the model and, to be fair, the setbacks proved to be a new learning experience and came with some advantages: I could smudge the charcoal in a smoother way, giving it a more "stained" and smooth look.

I started by drawing a thumbnail, to figure out the composition. It was quite simple: since the model was in a slight 3/4 view, I placed it more to the right, to give more breathing space in front of the face. 

I then started sketching and adding shadows. One thing that I noticed about my work is I always draw with line instead of using light and shadow to recreate the object or person in front of me. There is a really strict process I follow: I always sketch everything in detail. To be fair, this doesn't really aid me in adding proper contrast and shadows and properly describing the shapes in space, so maybe I could benefit from placing the shadows earlier on my portraits. 

I added the darkest shadows first: in the eye area, from the brow, underneath the nose and on the chin.

The charcoal kept smudging, so some of the contrast was gone in this next step, but I fixed it later. I proceeded to add the middle tones. 

The lines underneath the eyes were quite harsh, seeming more like cuts than actual shadows on a face, so I softened them, trying to describe the shape underneath the eyes better. I also darkened some areas and added the rest of the shading and some more detail in the eyes. When it came to more precise lines I struggled a bit due to the charcoal not sticking to the page, but in the end, using a thinner charcoal piece, I managed to achieve a pleasing result. 

I added more details, worked more on some of the harsher shadows and tried to add more contrast. This was the final result:

After getting the feedback, I will return to describe my steps on applying it and to show the final result post-feedback.

Surprisingly, this task made me enjoy charcoal and the freedom it can give when it comes to depicting shadows through smudging, as well as the smoothness of the material. In the future, I will definitely practice more using charcoal. I am quite pleased of how the eyes turned out despite the struggles I faced with them. I also like how the highlights on the lips give them more dimensionality.