Daily Archive

All of these are about light, and take several different approaches to getting light to show up on paper. It is so hard for me to leave parts of the paper blank. I’m looking at this person’s skin, and it’s not white. I want to put shading everywhere. If I force myself to leave the lightest patches completely clear of charcoal, good things tend to happen.I got fussy with the many shades of gray in these next two, but the patches of pure white go a long way toward rescuing me from the cul-de-sac I was creating.

Make sure to include shadows where body touches floor; they make light visible.

Sometimes the light makes things invisible: the edge of a cheek, the detail of a bottom lip, are lost because the light falls on them so brightly.