My first drawing for 2022 started a bit late but that was mainly due to two reasons. The first one is I had pulled a muscle in my right arm/elbow while working on projects in my garage, in December, and the second was that we here at the house were dealing with Covid for the first two months. Needless to say, I had little to no interest in drawing.
And then when I did work on this latest drawing, I make sure I was careful to not put any added stain on the arm.
This this period piece, I used my face from an older photo of me when I was about 30, and with the aid of Adobe Photoshop, I created a reference photo of what of pf my ancestor might have looked like in Amsterdam. The background was taken from an old Dutch painting.
Through the years I have noticed my style changing and becoming rougher, so I wanted to make this one as light as possible. It didn't work. By the time the drawing was completed, the shadows and depth of his hair were dark, so I kept at it. No use of changing what is already working.
The entire drawing was created using lines and crosshatching. Starting first with the darker shadows and gradually go lighter. Using lighter pencils as my blending tools.
As for the background and his coat, those are drawn using swirls, and overlaying them as you randomly cover the paper. Again, starting with the darker pencils and gradually introducing the lighters one. A Q-Tip was used to blur the graphite, in larger swirl motions simular to when placing the graphite.
A kneaded rubber eraser was used to remove any unwanted dark areas where the swirls have overlapped..
