Screen Withdrawal, Portrait of Brother- Aadhya Ramineni
Author: araminen
Aadhya Portrait Prep
Excellent work, Aadhya. A very sensitive, confident, and subtle rendition of the original. Just a few notes:
The whites of her eyes on the left (our left) are not that light. They’re noticeably shaded in the original, along with every value in the eye socket, making that eye more mysterious.
Her upper lid on that eye is also a bit wider, lowered, and more relaxed–yours looks a bit startled.
The base of the nose should be a bit wider (look for it to be the width between the tear ducts, as it is in the original), and the modeling a bit softer.
The upper lip is fuller and more softly drawn (less sharply defined edges).
Great job–
These studies are very good. Nice to see–
Aadhya Ramineni Team Value Drawing
Like the other pencil drawing, your strokes in this one should be much gentler and more tempered. These would be great for the ink drawing but the pencil drawing requires a more refined technique. That can still be accomplished here as described in my notes for the other pencil drawing. The light grey values here are darker still. Once again, compare them to the white of the paper. There’s no value in the reference that approaches the whiteness of the border.
Very good, but the large dark shape to the upper left is much darker. Like your other ink drawing, the freer stroke in the values doesn’t extend to the forms themselves; shapes could be tidied up, even as the hatching strokes remain freer. See the examples I sent a week ago for an example.
As noted in my email to the class, these strokes are too forceful and untempered. The texture here should be built gradually from many layers of strokes, each lightly applied and “neutralizing” the grain in one another. This can be improved by using a very sharp point to draw into the space and gaps between the darkest strokes, to even the texture.
Very good so far, but the darks need to be much darker–many more layers of scribbling. The white stripe on the lower left is a middle-grey, not white. Even with this expressionist technique you can define the edges of shapes more accurately. The hatching might be free but the forms should have as much definition as they do in the reference image.
Aadhya- Time Capsule
Excellent work (see my comments) but your perspectives are off. Most noticeable is the painting on the wall, the bottom edge of which should be converging on a common vanishing point with the baseboard and the short end of the countertop. But the recliner is also slightly askew. It would look more like this:
Note how that also has the games touching the edge of the frame, just like the stool, the painting, and all the background material. Not only does this complete the visual “theme” but makes stronger (better defined) negative spaces and ties the image to the rectangle. Your objects float a bit.
Finally, I’d also recommend cropping the left a bit. It goes on a bit without adding anything to the drawing (much like the space between the plant and the bed last week). Your sketch of the painting is just terrific. I didn’t want to lose any of it so I moved it down the wall–and in the process made a tighter connection (and better negative spaces) with the chair. Note how the cropping plus the more correct (and more dramatic) perspective anchors and opens the space to the viewer more.
Aadhya – Drawing in Place
Using Photoshop I moved the bed closer to the plant to fill the rectangle more effectively. Note how this also uses the rule of thirds to strengthen the design:
I like the way this places the right edge of each window frame on a third, and how the plant, while mainly in the middle, sticks its nose into the left third, and the bed, while mostly in the right third, dips its toe into the middle third.Finally, a painting by English artist Lucian Freud that your drawing brought to mind (good company to be in):
