Charcoal and Light

Drawing from last week, with charcoal and eraser on manila Tagboard. This is one of a series on this paper, and I like this paper, it is thick and sort of tough and shades well.

There's a place you can sit with the light just raking from up high and shadowing from the right, and i try to set in the same place each week.

This model had lots of twists and turns and shapes in her body, and the light seemed to bounce into the shadows, as well as the highlights, and any place one tried to draw had levels and levels of intricacy.

I draw an outline to start, and start building the drawing inside of it, and shading, and then i take a cloth and smear the heck out of it and suddenly it sort of gets interesting, and then i take harder charcoal, compressed charcoal and start drawing, and i push it around and try to see the darkenesses and their different levels, but i try to save erasing with a kneaded eraser to the last I can- as it is something that i have always done, and its hard to make it look not erasery and too sharp, so i try to learn how to work it in so if feels more like drawing and less like erasing.

I think the hard thing is to bring it along too far working on shadows and textures and then realizing that something is way off in the drawing- so thats hard.

It seems like in the end its about trying to get the light to have some sort of presence, so that it feels like it has some light in it.