Sometime back I promised to take "behind-the-scenes" progress photos of one of my drawings as I was working on it. Last month, I started work on this piece, specifically to enter into the local art show. AND I remembered to take photos as I went! This one is called "Sunday Solitude". I used my favorite combination of graphite and pen. Here it is from beginning to end: Day 1: September 15th. One of the rare times you'll ever catch me making a grid to enlarge a drawing! The small sketch of the woman was pretty much just what I wanted though, so I spent a LOT of time making the grid on the larger paper. Drawing by the grid was tedious. But worth it. There she is all enlarged on the 18x 24 paper. What I swore to myself I would do: pencil in everything before I ever touched it with an ink pen. Because I always love seeing people's clean, complete pencil drawings before they had ink or color. What happened: I got impatient to start inking almost immediately. Oops. Since I already inked in one corner, it quickly became a game of "draw some, ink some". I then said I would not do any shading until I had all the line art done. So here is some shading, Just to see how it was going to look...because I couldn't wait. This was the point where I really had to ink portions after drawing them in pencil so the lines wouldn't get smudged. I also decided I wanted the open places to be glimpses into space rather than just puddles of water. Creating the rocks was my favorite part. Finally, one side of the flower field reaches all the way to the top. More flowers, more rocks. Testing out that hair. Here is where I realized I had no idea what design to put on her dress that would show up in all those flowers. Obviously a floral pattern was NOT a good idea. I played around using my first small sketch as a practice "doll" for different dresses. Since this was for a "family friendly" art show/contest, I decided not to leave her bare. This is what her dress ended up being. Meanwhile, flowers are growing up all the way across the page. Almost there. Next two photos are where I was adding more shading details to the flowers, rocks, and hair. Last day, October 20th. Done1 Approximately 120 hours of work. It doesn't show up well but her hair is lightly tinted with brown watercolor pencil, and the pears with green. Everything else is ink and graphite, except for the tiny white stars in all the open "pools". I did those with acrylic because I don't have a white pen. A couple of detail pics of rocks and flowers. She took second place in the professional division at the art show. Not too bad, but next year I plan to beat my score. ;)
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