Critique: Rendering

Some 5 to 10 minutes drawings, forget to showed them. One of my 10 minute drawing I was focusing on the upper body. I did noticed that blocking the shadows (with the help of squintikng my eyes) does make the process more simplified. Any suggestions?

https://imgur.com/Q9DlH41

https://imgur.com/2qC5eg1

https://imgur.com/NpFIKhs

It's a bit hard to explain, but especially when you have a darker shadow inside a brighter shadow, you tend to focus a lot on smoothing out the transition, which kills the illusion of volumn and makes the area look like one flat papercut. Try to use the edges of shadows, or even of different values of darkness within one shadow area, as construction lines, that emphasize either the volumn or interesting details.

Also, you use a quite rough paper, which leaves some of your shadows very grainy. You still achieve a deeper darkness by applying more pressure, but the grainyness remains. I am afraid you either have to switch to smoother paper, or get used to drawing repeatedly over the same area, until the grainyness is at least largely diminished, as especially in your darker shadow, it also seems to kill the volumn. Maybe drawing, rubbing, drawing over it could help?

Btw, I am starting with the problems solely to honor my national reputation of painful directness and social ineptitude (kraut here). The problems aren't consistent, they don't ruin your entire work, and you make good progress. These are just the things which I think would have the most impact if successfully changed.

You know, JO, I think you're really getting to be on the right track with your patterns of lights and shadows shapes, but I feel that these are getting to be farther too smoother and slicker yet. How would you like to please go ahead with the stronger and more powerful shapes of tones with 16 minutes of 2 minute poses in lights and shadows please?

The premise behind this whole thing is because you not need to think of shadows and lights as just shadows and lights, but more so as lines and shapes of them. For more details, kindly look into some online tutorials on how to observe tones for your drawings. Let's hope they've worked out for you for the better.

Thanks for the suggestions. I do prefer critiques that are direct and on point, all of your suggestions had been very insightful.

Also, what type of paper that is ideal for graphite? I'm using a sketchbook that said that it can be used for pencils and ink. But what qualities that I should look for when shopping for paper?

Honestly, #1 quality: cheap! The cheaper your paper, the less you have motivation to worry about turning each sketch into a museum piece, and the more relaxed you can just scribble away and waste huge stacks of it. I mostly use printer paper made for business correspondence from a stationery store or even better a dollar shop. It's mass produced for all sort of administration tasks and therefor almost unbeatable in price.

If you go for more elaborate paper, I would think less in terms of good or bad, and more like an alchemist: if I mix this kind of paper with that kind of drawing medium, what will be the effect? Probably the reason to make a sketchbook from rough paper is to disuade the artist from focusing on minute details too much, and emphasize the flimsical nature of initial sketches. Now, you decided to focus on rendering, which is on the opposite end of the scale in terms of the work process. (sketching, then construction, then line work, then rendering) You can do detail on rough paper, it just takes more time and effort to get the lines and values look sharp, and the key is to pay attention to the grittyness and draw repeatedly over the same spot to catch all the white spots left between the bumps. (you will need quite a sharp point on your pencil to even get between the bumps; having a spare pencil prepared, so you don't have to break your workflow for resharpening might be a good idea) On the upside, this gives you an additional contrast that you can use for expression, with crisp and sharp values where you want to focus on, and a more gritty, spontaneous look on the periphery of your work.

I just finished a session with your post in mind, and observed how I do rendering. So, a) idiosyncrasy warning, I am not an accomplished master myself, this isn't immutable law, just the way I do it momentarily, and b) I usually use ink brush, which is almost digital in terms of darkness value, and does not even allow for arbitrarily thin lines, so I need to plan for hatching.

What I generally do, is that I draw the outlines for most shadow areas before I actually start entering the value. If done right, visual habits will already kick in and "fill in" the values to turn the figure 3-D, before I even start hatching, and occassionally, if I want to indicate a very light darkness value, it is even enough to just let a very light outline do the work, without any hatching at all.

Basically every detail on a figure, that isn't an actual surface color (like on a piece of clothing, a tattoo, body hair or strong variations in skin tone) IS a shadow. If you just bury them all in smooth gradients, they will be gone. If that is the result of you purposefully simplifying your construction and linework, that can look extremely stylish, if that happens as an accident of your final rendering, it will just look boring and flat.

Here is an example of me preparing a figure for shading. It isn't a textbook example for a number of unrelated reasons (line quality and proportions are questionable at best, for example), but I just happened to end the drawing process right before starting to shade.

I completly agree with Aunt about the paper.



I own an really cool, expensive and large sketchbook.... I rarely use it.... and I am allways a bit disturbed by it when I do... And think even without noticing, that my drawings there have to be special.

I feel more free with cheap paper...

All the best

Pasta