Black Fan

In keeping with yesterday's ramble about paying attention to all the elements in a piece I though this may be of interest. It's a little older too so maybe you can use it to gauge my progress or lack of progress. First let me say this is not the way to put a picture together. Don't try this at home.


Another little silverpoint as you may have guessed. A decent drawing, the forearm and hand seem nice and solid. Overall though, nothing to write home about. It's certainly on the blah side. So it sat around for a while until I decided maybe I could still pull it off.


That's a little better with just the addition of a vertical element and a horizontal. Now there's a little stability to the image, but still not right. Too much of that so what feeling. It needs some depth.


Now that's not so bad, not my best, but much better than the original version. There's some solidity to the composition, some depth. The lights and darks are balanced out all right. (The image is about a half step too dark here, sorry.) It's more than a figure just plopped down in the middle of the page. Not that that can't be pulled off, I just didn't originally do it here.

One other vaguely interesting thing here is that since it was done over a period of about eight months the earliest parts of the drawing had started to tarnish already. I don't think you can really see it here, you can just barely see it in person. From across the room it really isn't apparent, but up close the figure and to a lesser extent the horizontal ledge is much warmer than the distant landscape. That will even out soon enough, but it was nice to see the change. Normally the change is so slow and subtle even I don't notice it.