Working On Unfinished Projects

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hello everyone! I hope you are having a good day today!

For this week in my journey of getting back on the artistic horse, I decided to work on a project of mine that I had put to the side for quite a while. It is a depiction of the goddess Aphrodite in oil paint.

At first I wanted to exaggerate the proportions of the head and eyes, and ended up deciding against it as I did some practice sketches. To me it did not seem to align with the goddesses image, so I decided to go a little more on the traditional proportion route. Though I may do a little bit of exaggerating with some features later on.

This is one of my first sketches for the face I was planning on using for the depiction of Aphrodite. 

In my original planning stages for the piece I wanted to have the depiction of Aphrodite crossing her legs, however, due to my gained knowledge on goddess since then, I've decided to have her be a mermaid. Plus, with painting in layers I can always start over or go over particular parts that aren't  pleasing to the eye.

The photo above are sketches of mine to try to see how I want the mermaid to be posed. 

From my own experience with painting, the main thing is to make sure the canvas will not be showing through, so at this particular stage I'm not too concerned with how the background looks. It was set up for the previously decided pose for the goddess which is why it is a bit off on placement. I'm thinking of maybe doing some geometric patterns or sea life around the edges to help with the balance of the painting. This is so the tail doesn't lead your eyes off the canvas.

Here, I've started to sketch the figure on the painting itself with a charcoal pencil.

In case you wish to know, the medium I used for the paint was just simple sesame oil. The original reason why I set this painting aside was because I needed the oil to have plenty of time to dry. Then it ended up being where I knew I needed to study more to feel comfortable doing the painting at all. I hope that I can do well with this painting in the coming weeks. 

For next week I will be showing my continued progress with this painting. Hopefully it goes well! And if not, well, there is always another canvas needing paint. 

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The Art of Eyes : Distortion and Shading Practice

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hi everyone! For this week I decided to keep up with practicing drawing the eye and while doing so I've learned some little tricks for helping to correct some errors. 

1) I found out how you can use photography to your advantage! 

This may not work in all settings since I'm drawing from a photograph, but what I found helps is while I'm drawing to take photos during some pauses in the process to see how I'm doing. This little tip helped me figure out the next one as well.

2)Try to look as straight on to your subject and your paper since, if you don't, it can end up becoming distorted. 

From my own experience this is because your eye is seeing your subject at a different angle, same as your paper. This can make it where you can end up drawing lines too long or too short, among other possible distortion issues.

I found out the distortion that was happening after I took my first photo (shown above). I saw that I had made the end of the eyelid- near the tear duct- too close to the tear duct and at a too drastic of an angle.

Then, once I took my next photo, I found out I had made the pupil a little too small to the right, so I fixed it as best as I could at the time. 

Once I had taken what I considered my last photo of this eye I had been working on, I remembered three more tricks I wanted to share. 

1) Drawing in the same direction the whole time makes the image look more natural and gives it less unnecessary texture. 

2) Blending with a paper napkin works better than blending with a piece of computer paper.

3) You can over blend.

In the picture shown above is my form study I did since I had enough time to do it this week. A way I found to help with not using guide lines in the shadow -since it's so light in value- is to lightly shade in the general area and erase what doesn't need to be there. 

Thank you for reading my blog! I really do appreciate it! If you want to ask me any questions directly related to this post you can comment in the comment section below and I will try my best to answer. 

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Practicing the Eye

By Elissa Rosenthal

The eyes, in my opinion, are the focal point to a character or portrait. So, I decided this week to practice drawing some eyes. Particularly my eyes for studding the structure and proper placement since, if I need a new angle, I can take another photo of the same eyes. 

I decided to take a photo instead of studying in the mirror since it's pretty difficult to understand how large the iris needs to be when your eyes are looking at your eyes. Plus, I wear glasses and I wanted the study to be focused on my eyes, not the glasses, and be able to see. 

Here is my first attempt at drawing my eyes. With this one I did the left eye first, then the right. It's very clear I learned some proportion and how to shade during the first eye since the second eye does not look nearly as flat and improperly shaped. 

I found it really interesting how different the change was between the first and second attempt. Since this was my first time drawing the same thing more than once, I haven't experienced this type of progression before. I think I'm going to continue drawing this view of the eyes for a few more times to improve. 

The hardest part for me was the sizing and shape of the eye. It wasn't until this practice I noticed I'd been drawing my pupils in self portraits way too small.

This practice helped me notice how detailed the eyes are, even when at rest. Eyes can bring the character out in a portrait and make the viewer more interested. This is similar to how the expressions of characters in stories help the reader understand them. It is possible my mind was a bit primed for drawing the personality behind the eyes because of me working on my character development for a story I'm working on. Or, perhaps that's a bit of a reach.

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Staying With Grayscale

By Elissa Rosenthal

Hello my butterflies! I'm sorry about the late upload. I usually schedule my posts to come up automatically in the morning on Saturday. This past week, however, I've been dealing with a cold. So, instead of writing my post last night and scheduling it to come up early today as I usually do, I ended up falling asleep. I am sorry. 

Anyway, here is the post for the week! I've found this one artist who does YouTube videos and, though her work mostly goes around Photoshop, I have been finding some of her videos quite interesting and they have sparked more of a desire in me to draw. Though I will say, the particular video I was watching was a bit out of my current league. Her YouTube channel is called Istebrak, and I was watching her video on how to color skin. 

Now, though I had seen a previous video of hers' where there was a warning about going to colors too quickly, I did it anyway. At least until I realized she was right. As you can see below I chose the colors I thought would work for my particular situation with using colored pencils. They are Shuttle Art brand colored pencils if you are wondering. They are from their 136 color set. These are cheaper colored pencils, so I don't particularly recommend them, though they are better than the kind you would use in Elementary School. 

Istebrak was right. Since I had not practiced grayscale for a long time, I had a particularly hard time with colors and distinguishing their value. I tried to take some of the tips from her drawing in Photoshop and translate them into colored pencils. It particularly did not help that I was going off of no references. As you can see the nose has, as Istebrak refers to them, baby nostrils. If this nose was on an adult they would have some serious breathing problems. The second image is supposed to be the skin that would be around the eye, however, it looks a bit too almond shaped. Not to mention both have very yellow skin, to where it looks almost neon. 

So, I went back to grayscale. I took out my favorite pencil, a Faber-Castell 6B, and started drawing a nose. I decided to take the time to go through some images of people's faces for this one though. I first blocked out the nose, finding where the curve where the tear ducts of the eyes would end, then from there finding the placement of the nostrils. What I found interesting, and what helped me to stay away from the problem of baby nostrils, is to divide the opening of the nose into three equal sections. Two for the nostrils, one for the septum. Plus, I tried my best to hold my pencil as far away from the tip as I could in order to start with large shaded areas, first making the whole area of the nose a mid-tone. I used another piece of computer paper to smudge the pencil, since smudging the medium with your figure puts your oils onto the paper, therefore making any mistakes harder to erase. I personally think this one is a lot better than I expected, particularly since this my first grayscale nose I've done in around a year or two. Though I will always want to be better and I am going to try my best to be better. 

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