There are three pieces in particular that I did this term that are not very good, and I cringe when I look at them. I had no intention of publishing them, until I realized that all of these failures had actually taught me a lot, and in each case it improved my drawing ability, or my understanding about different media.
Against my better judgment here they are.
This term I found using pencils to be too time consuming to get everything down, so I mostly used charcoal for in class models. This allowed me to quickly lay down a mid town, put in some darks and erase to pull out some highlights.
I was really liking charcoal and I felt I should experiment more with different types to see what I liked or disliked. On this particular day I pulled out a white piece of charcoal and went to town. What resulted was a muddy gray mess of confusion. I learned that just because you have all these different kinds and colors of charcoal doesn't mean you have to jam them all into one piece.
In this second piece came from the same day as the one above. It was a very off day, but informative! In this piece I am using that horrible white charcoal, and toned paper. Which this was my first time using toned paper. The papers tone is suppose to be your mid tone. This time I didn't blend the white and black together, but left them seperate. The only problem is that the white is just out of control, and the black is like midnight. I lost all control of gradation and tone... and once again it just becomes a mess...
On this day I left the white charcoal and toned paper behind, and just opted for the standard old charcoal. It was during this drawing session that I realized my use of charcoal was just too elementary. From this piece I learned that I need to try to figure out how to have better gradations of tone. This drawing I think has actually made me better. After this I really tried to figure out how to get more out of my charcoal drawings.
Dude I love these. Especially the bottom two. Hanging out with our shirts off- ya know.
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