Open air figure drawing of a winged Victory statue
6th and the hardest until now. I had a real crisis in the middle of the initial sketch. My mind tried to switch between what I already knew and what I learned recently. First time I thought I won’t finish the work.
After a little chat with our teacher I found some way through, but it was not the style I wanted.
Anyway, it showed me some strong and weak points. After all I am pretty happy with the final result and it’s the second FINISHED artwork from the course. About 4 hours of truly intensive concentration.
As a figure study it had to be as similar as possible, no place for impressions nor expressions.
Sepia effect + vignette added later in Lightroom of course
What I wanted to achieve this time
- FINISH THE WORK (A3 size)
- be quick while observing and while drawing, reducing unnecessary details at the beginning
- extremely important: proportions and a style
- crop the right frame
- taking care of the line thickness
- reduce excessive shading at the beginning, I left -most- of the shadows to the end of work
- follow the flow, relax the hand and mind
What went wrong
4 and 5 didn’t work. AGAIN I couldn’t break away from that photo framing style and instead of using some relative measurements I scaled the figure proportionally (!!!).
Second, I have chosen a 2H pencil or similar, but didn’t really check if that 2H is really hard. And it wasn’t. I realized that too late, as you can see on the drawing, there are too many lines of a similar thickness.
I tried to fix that later using eraser, but it’s not the same. For the final touches I used a graphite stick and 4B pencil.
Below there are few snapshots from that classes, wo what do you think??. Thanks for the visit!
A true open air work, no cheating.
First we had to get there and find a right figure as our subject. Everyone could choose one of many statues.
I really like this exercise and I think you've done a great job. I really struggle drawing people and so I try not to draw them if I can help it. I can still remember trying to draw models when I was at school,urgh, not fun. You've done an excellent job with this statue, lovely proportions, and I like your shading too :)
Thanks a lot Carolyne, well.. antique scultptures and all statues are great to draw, they don't move, have no unnecessary details and are mostly beautiful, unlike some people ;)
I am killing myself now with portraits, people, hands and trees, soon animals will come to play.
Truly a classic piece ! I totally loved the details in the wings, foldings and layers in the flowing gown. Those shadings are amazing. You have got the proportions right and even the angle of the statue is great !!
Very well done :)
Thanks for your kind words:)
I hope to show you something even better next time. I like it also, but still a lot of work ahead of me to get really repeatable and quick results.
Speed is my main target, but getting the speed is a slow process ;)