Drawing Final: Woman with Folded Legs

Done… for now. I’m still deciding if I need a shadow on the wall cast from her head, but I’ll get back to that later.

Drawing Update 5: Woman with Folded Legs

Well, I’ve finally gotten all the wall lines drawn in. I need to continue evening out the tone so it’s not so spotty. I’m not sure if I want her to cast a shadow on the wall, so I may draw a digital test of that to help me decide. Next I’ll work on the bottom front of the sofa, adding modeling and darker values, and that should wrap it up.

Some Old Figure Drawing Sketches

Still working on the back wall of the new ink drawing, but there’s nothing much to post yet, so I thought I’d dig out a few old figure drawing sketches to keep it active here. These were drawn with wax crayon on 12 x 18″ newsprint. I should have a new update coming on the ink drawing in a couple days.

Drawing Update 4: Woman with Folded Legs

I’m starting to get the sofa drawn in with its base values, and added a small pillow on the right to give the composition a stop on that side. It will have a darker gradient tone from right to left, and be darker on the bottom… eventually. I had to give my sore wrist a rest yesterday.

Drawing Update 3: Woman with Folded Legs

The figure is now all drawn in. That was the hard part. The rest is just a matter of drawing the large gradient values of the couch and wall.

Drawing Update 2: Woman with Folded Legs

A little further along.

Drawing Update: Woman with Folded Legs

I’ve started inking the figure. I discovered that black ink in the Uni-ball pen I’m using matches the PITT markers have, so I can use a PITT brush tip marker to fill in the solid black areas and move things along faster.

New Drawing Started: Woman with Folded Legs

I’m ready for the new drawing now that I’ve found a better surface for what I have planned. This is from the same sketch I had shown a couple posts back that I’ve transferred over lightly with charcoal. It’s on a full sheet of Strathmore illustration board that I’ve covered with two coats of a shellac primer. This will allow me to mark with ink, and easily scrape away lines as necessary. I had originally thought to work on a slightly grey tone, but decided to just leave it white.

The pen I’ll be using is a Uni-ball “Signo” Gel Grip pen. This is similar to their Gelstick I’ve used before, but this has a replaceable cartridge. One nice feature with ball point pens such as this is you can get a rough or broken line, even on smooth surfaces. The example above was made on plain copy paper. You hold the pen at an angle so that it just lays on the surface without any pressure. I’ll use this technique to lightly redraw the lines, and then erase the charcoal. Uni-ball (Stanford) makes a range of pen styles that use this same ink.

New Sketch: At the Tax Office

Well, I did a few tests on that gesso covered mat board I made a couple days ago. I was planning to do a large drawing on it, but discovered it’s not going to work well for me. The surface takes ink just fine, but I was also planning to scratch away areas too. Unfortunately, I realized that the black paper underneath makes it so that when a brighter top coat is lightly scrapped away, it makes that area look darker. That won’t work for me.

Not to worry, I’ll save that surface for a painting at some point later on. I can substitute another surface for that drawing, and will show that in a day or two.

In the meantime, here’s a little sketch I made recently at the local tax office.

Homemade Acrylic Gesso Experiment

I wanted to see if I could use an acrylic medium to approximate the same quality of surface I get using animal protein (hide glue or casein) for my binder when making gesso. This will not be the same result as the commercial brands of acrylic gesso you see on the market. That’s more like paint. The goal of this is to keep it very thin, and sand it to give me a surface that’s smooth as marble.

My choice for acrylic polymer medium for this experiment was Golden’s GAC 800 medium. The description of it being “useful as a modifier when adhesion to chalky surfaces is desired” sounded good for this application. The solids I’m using are the same as what I use for traditional gesso: calcium carbonate. I sometimes also add titanium white pigment, but not this time. I wanted something more grey. The surface I’m applying it to is a medium thickness black mat board. The black will help me evaluate the coverage better, and again I’m trying for a grey undertone for the artwork I’m planning. I normally use a wood panel for my gesso, but I wanted to see if the acrylic would allow me to work on something a bit more flexible.

The mat sheet is in the center (approximately 18 x 24″) with 12 coats of my acrylic gesso mixture applied. I coated the back of the sheet with a couple coats of thinned medium (no solids) to keep it from warping. The amount of medium is roughly 10% by volume, but I haven’t been doing any careful measuring – just going by sight. In the end, I wanted something very thin, like a watercolor wash, or onion soup, so it has quite a lot of water. There’s a piece of the original black mat board on the far left. I placed a sheet of white copy paper on the right to show the contrast.

This bowl shows a small amount of the gesso left over, and helps show how thin it is. I applied a single coat on that black sample to the right. It dries relatively quickly – about 15 minutes to the touch, and the texture feels the same as the traditional gesso I make.

So far so good. I’m going to let it continue to air dry for a couple days, and then see how well I can sand it smooth.

Enlarge a Drawing Using a Computer Monitor

I wanted to enlarge this sketch to a larger size, and I can use my computer monitor as a sort of light table to help do that. The drawing is on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper, and the size I’m enlarging to is about 18 x 24 inches. Here’s how I did that.

I scanned the drawing at 200 dpi. The viewing software I’m using is IrfanView, a freeware program for Windows. You can use any other viewing software as long as it allows you to zoom out to full screen without any distortion.

Next I zoomed in to a size that displayed on the screen the exact size I wanted the artwork to be. In this case that was 4 times (with IrfanView press the + key 4 times.) I then scrolled the screen to the left and up all the way so that the top left corner of the screen was the top corner of the scan.
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I held a thin sheet of copy paper, 8.5 x 11″, on the left corner, and copied a reference mark from the scan to the paper. If you don’t have a mark on your drawing that fits into the area of the sheet of paper, add one on the drawing (such as an “X”) and scan it again.
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Now I scroll directly to the right top corner, hold up another sheet of copy paper, and make a mark using the same reference point of the drawing.
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I then scroll down as far as the image will go, hold another sheet of paper to the screen, and make another mark at the same reference point. The last step is to piece all three pieces of paper together.
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I laid the three sheets of paper on the floor, and overlapped them so that the reference points lined up. I then squared them up with two t-squares, and determined that the outer edge measurements came to 17 x 22.”
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I will now use a 17 x 22″ sheet of paper (newsprint paper works well, or I could tape 4 pieces of copy paper together) to trace the image from my computer monitor, and then transfer that to whatever surface my artwork will use.