Self Portrait - 8th September 2006
This self portrait is, quite obviously, just a sketch. It took about three hours, about as long as it would usually take me just to lay a drawing like this out in line, if I was being careful about it. For this drawing, I was less concerned with getting everything in the right place, and much more concerned with tone, the lights and darks.
This is something I've been working on over the last fortnight with my series of 100 still life drawings, of which I've now done twenty-one (counting today's drawing of two shells.) I've stopped painting completely for the time being, whilst I try to get to the bottom of my problems with tone. Gradually, through a process of trial and error and the advice of Mr. Steven Sweeny, I've arrived at an approach which works for me.
It's been troubling me for some time that I don't have a tonal range as wide as what I see in nature available to me. I can generally get as dark as I want, but not as light as I want. Paper, or paint, only reflects a certain amount of light, and there are many, many objects in nature which reflect significantly more light. That means that the intensity of the highlights in nature generally can't be matched in either a drawing or a painting.
The answer to this problem, or at least one answer which seems to work for me, is really fairly simple. It's taken me a long time to get to this point, but the basic approach is to establish the darkest dark and the lightest light on the drawing straight away. You then have the two extremes of your available tonal range right in front of you, and you can relate every other tone to those. As long as you preserve the general ratios between the tones in your drawing, the forms will live and the light will appear convincing and clear. Now this is something I've come across in books on painting before, I believe I've tried it before too on the odd early still life painting, but it seems I had, as usual, to make myself jump through multiple hoops before I was convinced that it was right. I had to get it wrong a lot of times first.
For this drawing, the darkest dark, which went on first, was my right shoulder in shadow, on the left as you look at the drawing. That one is matched by the shadows of the folds on the jumper on the right, and the background on the right, up around my head and over to the top left of the drawing. Once I'd laid out the rough position of the shapes, these parts went in first, roughly and quickly with a big chunk of scene painter's charcoal.
Next stage was the highlights on the forehead, the nose and the cheek bone on the right. The drawing didn't look like much at this stage, but I had my tonal range established.
Next, I put in the biggest tone block, down my face and neck on the left. That also included the shape round the eye on the right, and a little bit on the ear. This part was done in quite painstaking fashion, with a series of horizontal parallel lines which were then smoothed in with a stomp. Already at this stage I could start to see the form emerging. After some softening of the transitions to the blank paper at the edge of that main tone block, I darkened the shape around the jaw on the left, and modulated the big tone block here and there by taking some out with a putty rubber. Some detail was put into the light area on the right with what charcoal was left on the stomp, just rubbed into the surface. All this stage was a kind of push and pull, darkening and lightening here and there until more of the smaller forms started to appear out of the big shadows.
I didn't spend a great deal of time at this stage, and although I could have continued refining the shapes and tones and added a lot more detail, I wasn't looking or a finished drawing here. I really just wanted to see if the way I'd been approaching the small still life drawings was going to work on a portrait.
For my money, it does. If I contrast this drawing with my last self portrait, it's very noticeable how much stronger this one is, in terms of tone. The last one looks hesitant in comparison, although of course it has more detail.
I don't want to push this any further with the portraits for now. I don't want to run before I can walk. I've been doing that a lot, ever since I started painting and drawing again, and falling over repeatedly has shown me that it's not a good idea. For the time being, I plan to do future portrait drawings like this one, without too much detail, concentrating on the main tone blocks. I will be more careful about the laying out though, since the likeness is could have been much better on this one since the drawing out stage was done quickly. I could have been a lot more assiduous about the detailing and relationships between the tones too.
But today, for this drawing, I'm happy. As far as I'm concerned, I've proved to myself that this is a good way to approach laying out the tones in a drawing, establishing the form and the light, regardless of whether I'm drawing a piece of fruit or my own face. The process is the same. Although it may not look it, I think this self portrait is a big step forward. Now I need a lot more practice with this, so it's back to the still life drawings.