Work in progress …
Tag: digital
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Reclining Figure
Color exploration from live model. NuPastel on paper, 11”x14” Abstraction (digital) Initial lay-in, from memory. Pastel on Canson C à Grain board, 16”x20” -
Man on the Street
A guy I passed by on the street. Drawn from memory. I found my way to Shortwave in Alley A. It was quiet there, two employees, a few patrons, plenty dark. I had in mind to sketch people in the coffee house, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy that I had passed on the sidewalk on my way downtown.
His mouth, shaped like a fish hook, appeared from 12 feet away to be a greeting smile, but I realized as I got closer: he wasn’t smiling. I’d seen him once before, but only once, so he was familiar and strange to me at once. I thought that my expression was warm. His was extremely neutral. No smile, no nod—just a rugged, good-looking badass pretending that I wasn’t there and it wasn’t cold as he strolled headlong into the wind on a December afternoon.
I couldn’t figure out how to draw his unique mouth without it looking like he was smiling, so I tamed it down. H looks more friendly in my sketch than in my memory. Adding warm colors doesn’t help any.
Digital sketch using Procreate on iPad. -
Tuesdays at Orr Street
Tia
I took my iPad to Orr Street Tuesday night. After a couple of quick sketches with charcoal pencils in my regular sketchbook, I broke out the iPad for some no-mess painting.
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Saturday Sketchbook
“Mary Louise Kelly”
I was asked if I could work up a portrait of Mary Louise Kelly, who has recently been in the news due to an off-the-record interaction with some political ass clown. I was sent a link to a Vogue article that included this photograph by Katarina Price and liked it because it was one of the only pictures I could find where she isn’t smiling. Smiling wasn’t going to be a good look for the assignment. Lucky for me, Katarina Price released this image for publishing and remixing under the Creative Commons license. The stipulations are that any derivative work must also be published under the same or similar share-alike Creative Commons license.
Photograph of Mary Louise Kelly by Katarina Price, I opened the image on an iPad and set it on the ground about four feet away from me and sketched freehand. I got a pretty good likeness but thought I was a little bit off. Something as simple and unnoticeable as rotating the sketch a degree or two can throw things off.
Mary Louise Kelly. Pen and ink illustration by Jeffrey A. Rogers. The finished file was going to have to be digital, so I brought the photograph and my initial sketch into Procreate and lined them up to see where I had gone wrong. I was surprised at just how much of the freehand sketch lined up with the image, but also saw immediately where I had missed in the angle/shape of the nose and crucial relationship of eyes/nose.
Initial ink laid over reference image. Doing the initial sketch gave me a sense of what worked, the kinds of lines I wanted to use, and familiarity with the subject. Using the photo reference directly under my line work afforded me the opportunity to trace an accurate likeness. I chose to simplify the clothing in order to emphasize the face. Thicker outlines and eliminating the texture make the bust feel much more solid and seems to transition better to the intended typography below.
Mary Louise Kelly. Digital illustration by Jeffrey A. Rogers.
