I stayed for the afternoon, which was one 3-hour pose. The upper study was tow hours, using Nobel hard compressed charcoal on a 22 x 30" sheet of Maidstone paper. The lower one is a 25-minute study, same charcoal on an 18 x 24" sheet of Canson Sketch paper.
The monitor of the session tried setting things up to exploit the daylight, with a little incandescent fill to help. but it led to the lighting shifting quite radically over the afternoon. By the time I had reconciled the longer study, the outside light was dying off, so the shorter study (which is from a slightly different position, ) was almost all lit with one incandescent light. That's the trouble with daylight, unless one has north-facing skylights; the sun swings around noticeably from hour to hour.
I liked the longer study, and was exploring what sort of background to use. One idea I have been exploring a bit lately is having two ground-plane edges meeting a vertical in the background, to infer a 2-point perspective meeting of X,Y and Z axes. The actual space was dark, but I wanted something lighter. To break up the big negative spaces, I tried a Richard Diebenkorn-style set of criss-crossing lines, pushed out close to the edges - so they would demarcate the limits of the picture field, and make the big open spaces of the top half into more distinct zones of negative space. I kind of like what that did.
The shorter study benefited from the hours of warm-up I'd done up to then.
This is a beautiful drawing!
ReplyDeleteYes, taking advantage of natural light for a long pose can be challenging.
I did some modeling for an artist in his home studio. He did not want to use artificial lighting. So, our appointments were always at the same time of day in order to keep the lighting as consistent as possible.