Entry for Jan 23, 2015

On Friday I went drawing again. I bypassed a too-busy session at TSA of short poses, and went over to Artists 25 instead. Polyna was there that night, doing part of a multi-week pose. This is a 2-hour study, done with gray ink in brushpens and some Chinese ink washes as base values.
The image is a little stiff.  Polyna's head seems a fraction big and edges into cartoon territory, and her foreshortened body sinking into the chair looks awkward. ( I don't know why people seem to be using black cloths on chairs and stools these days - it sort of undermines any adjacent shadow possibilities.)
I kept the background lighter, and I'm happy with the range of marks and values in this one, which includes a fair bit of applying dark ink on the tip of a pen filled with lighter ink, and exploiting the gradients that makes.
This is on an 11 x 22" sheet of the same 200 lb rag cold-pressed paper as the Tuesday. No sanding this time, and it was playing nicer, which I was liking. I feel the inks I are sitting better on this paper. Some of the background washes were applied with regular watercolour brushes, not brushpens, which led to broader strokes and some richer textural effects.