Dan de Blondevil   Comment Posted Jul.4th, 2009, viewed 7 times

Dear picky teacher, sure I take this all as good advice! Indeed your praises made me blush… please tell my fellows that I didn’t pay any extra for this :)

Now to the drawings. As with the urn, I had problems to strike a balance between the photo and your artistic rendering. Your step by step guide is very clear, make me see things I can’t by myself and understand how to reach the final result. But because I still have lot to learn, I tend to see things in black and white, while real things are always in gray scale.
My problem is as follow. Betty Edwards (as you well know) claims people draw a stereotyped image of things instead of what they see. Since I read this it became my “religion” to draw what I see. Then my captain come and tell me I have to render things…

I can feel there’s no contradiction in this, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle; or that maybe this two point of view describe different aspects of drawing. But at the moment it’s just a feeling, I still can’t encompass them in my brain.
In the specific case of nose, I was confused by the shadows. Nostrils (the hole I mean) were black: compared to this the left side of the nose was for me a level 1 or 2. But in your rendering it was all much darker. I intentionally stuck to the photo and tried my best…
The second problem was the tip of the nose. I followed the instruction about basic shape and so on. But when it came to shade the tip I found out it was to round and big, due to the basic circle (me too I’m too picky). In the photo the angle from nostrils to tip were much steeper, resulting almost in a pointed nose tip. I saw this, but I didn’t know how to adjust it …

As for the lips, it was a nightmare. I tried to improve them a little with the indenting technique, but the general shape and shadow position is wrong. If I find the time I’ll try to do them again. My fellows who already did the exercise (Barb, Capstar, Lois and Charlotte) all did much better than me in this: so I’ll also study their drawings.

Hope you can help me more, as usual :)