Category: Drawing

Here’s one way (below) to depict faces if you don’t want to deal with them–at the very least show us the planes of the head. To exclude them entirely in a drawing in which all other planes are at least minimally indicated actually draws more attention to them; conspicuous in their absence. A face (at this distance) can be broken into 4 main shadow planes–the two eye sockets, under the nose and the shadow on the upper lip, as I’ve done here:

You’ll notice the one I didn’t add to is your brother, who’s actually your best figure in my estimation. The way he’s cropped and the half light he seems to be in is all you need.

A painting that came to mind, oddly enough, is Matisse‘s The Dance. Here the figures aren’t distant from one another at all, but Matisse goes out of his way to hide their faces. He wouldn’t have been daunted about painting them, so he had another reason–my guess is to make them more universal, and focus attention on their bodies and movement over their identity. But you’ll notice, when he’s forced to deal with that one toward the upper right, that he hits the planes I just mentioned, quickly and simply–also volumetrically, wrapping the planes around the head rather than painting a 2D mask.

I also thought of Fairfield Porter, who often downplayed the features into shadow planes. Note in his and the Matisse how much description you can get out of the shape of the hair alone–

Given what you wrote, and what I see in the drawing, I suggest a composition more like this (see below). I don’t see anything happening in that top third (or slightly more), so I say lose it. There’s also a conventional wisdom in portraiture to place the eyes in the upper half of the composition–yours are on the 50-yard line, and the composition is teetering top to bottom.

Meanwhile I’ve adjusted the perspective on the mantle to gently direct our attention to your eyes, which are the focal point. I’ve also added a framed picture on the left wall to do the same.

I like the way she’s closed in by the space, and I’ve added the perspective elements to ramp up that feeling of feeling safe and cozy but unable to ignore the larger forces looming around us.

You need to up your game when it comes to photo editing. I don’t know the original, of course, but my guess is that it’s closer to the following (I made all these adjustments in Snapseed using the tools I’ve outlined in my notes here on Blackboard):

I’m also guessing the spaces above and below the image are borders. If so, they don’t work as borders if there are none to the left and right, but start to look like they might be part of the drawing. My guess is that they’re not (so I trimmed them off) but correct me if I’m wrong.

Next suggestion: replace that mindless, all-purpose shading around the ball and the cup with something that says more. I’m suggesting a stipple of dots and dashes that suggest the texture of a putting green. I only did enough to give you the idea, but there could be more (like in yours). You could also replace the hatched shadows (which are fine) with the same texture but darker and denser. The same way you can still see the grass in the shadow this would give a stronger sense of the light falling on the green.

But as an added dividend, the tiny dots look a bit like clouds of germs.

I agree with Isaac–the top of the egg carton is wonky. This wouldn’t be an issue except that it twists the space just behind the egg. In addition, the carton wants to be the “straight man” (as in a comedy act) and a foil to the star–the egg. In other words it needs to be normal. I’ve taken a pass at correcting it below:

I also tweaked the embossed rectangle inside the lid, and let the egg eclipse it a little more; again, foregrounding the egg a bit. I suspect you drew this directly with your pen, rather than using a pencil under-drawing, so the distorted lid has a certain honesty–but in this case there are other virtues in the drawing to protect.

I also brought in the left and right side of the drawing. This image isn’t so much a still-life as something more iconic. The spaces to the left and right begged the question of what space it was in–bringing in the borders and neutralizing the implied environment (or the lack of one) makes that a moot point and again, foregrounds the carton and its sad egg.

Grace Bilodeau, Pencil, 9×6.5

Cezanne, The Bather, 1885

Instead of meaningless background hatching (see my comment to Ian Strudwick about this as well), better to leave it blank…

…or, with just a hint of space around the figure (below). I’ve chosen a line that might represent the bottom of a wall, “trapping” him between a wall behind him and the picture plane that you’ve so effectively placed him up against. Remember how Juan Gris used a nameless shape behind the Max Jacob portrait in a similar way.

I’ve set the line at a slight angle to make the space less stable and also since it’s about 90 degrees to the angle of his head, as well as that crease down the center of his shirt; a quiet way to connect the top to the bottom.

I’ve also darkened the exposure, by the way, which I suspect is closer to the original (but I might be wrong). If not, the drawing should be (agreeing with Isaac).

Or, if you prefer an energized field of marks, at least make them “autographic” and not neutral. In this example I tried to pick up on the kind of marks (good ones) I see in the folds of the clothes. Note how they also bristle with a barely contained energy.

I was going to suggest the following cropping for the sake of the hands alone–I think your drawing includes too much of the forearms at the expense of the more expressive hands (wonderfully drawn, BTW), and the blank areas inside the forearms don’t go with the overall style of filling space uniformly (i.e., no  resting places). But then I noticed that the words look interesting going out of the frame, as if they go on indefinitely–more of a sea of words and associations rather than just a “pond.”

But this wasn’t meant to exclude any of the words in the cropped sections–my main idea is to keep all the words just as they are but enlarge the hands in proportion to the rectangle and/or change the proportions of the rectangle itself.

In the process, however, I also happened on a square format, which might also have its advantages. Squares are equilateral–that is, they move in all four directions, rather than left/right only–making the sea of ideas more infinite. Horizontal compositions connote landscape space (and vertical compositions connote figurative space) but square compositions are equivocal, and more inclusive.

But whether you like these ancillary suggestions or not, my core suggestion is to have made the hands more prominent by cropping the forearms (a purely academic speculation,  by the way–this version of the drawing is fine as is).