Sustained Investigation 2

So like my last composition I primarily used charcoal as a material. I used both white charcoal and regular charcoal, but I used the white charcoal as more of a base to try to get richer values more realistic to the reference. I also used pencil to sort of sketch a really rough and light outline before I went over it in charcoal which would be more permanent.

For this project I chose the question of How can I use value and texture to draw animals with charcoal? I wanted to do this because I have never really tried drawing from a reference/ observational drawing, realistic drawing etc. I though focusing in on texture and value would help me focus in on the details to make the drawing to look more realistic. Animals have really good textures because of their fur so I knew I wanted my subject to be an animals, but I decided to do cats more specifically because I have cats and have a lot of pictures of them to use for references. I chose to use the specific question because I wanted to enhance my sense of value and texture to be able to improve on realistic compositions. I chose this specific reference of my cat because he has a lot of cool markings and values that I thought would challenge my use of texture and value. Also, I wanted to draw something that I like and connects to my life so I wanted to draw my favorite cat.

So first, based off of how my last project went I realized I needed to layer a lot more to get the rich values and intricate textures that I wanted. I experimented with layering in a few different ways. First I tried drawing the texture then adding highlights and then more individual textures (such as hair), but this did not work as well as I hoped. I decided to try a different approach. For the first layer I tried more of a base layer which I chose as white so I could darken the values as I needed, opposed to black where it was more difficult to lighten it. I found this worked the best. This project did not very evolve much over the process, except the different techniques I tried. It evolved a lot from my first sustained investigation composition. One of the biggest differences between the two compositions was the amount of time I spent working on the little details. I think the second composition was definitely much more 3D looking than the first one because the amount of effort I really put into the texture and the value. The composition still doesn’t look realistic or anything, but it’s a lot better than my first piece.

One of the next steps could be adding a background. For the background at the time, I didn’t want to draw it because it was very crowded and I though would take away from the focus of the drawing, which was my cat. Now that I’m looking back on it I think that was sort of stupid of me to do because there is way too much white-space and it just looks awkward and incomplete.