Saturday, January 28, 2017 at 06:40AM Started working on a new piece Vanitas 11 a couple of days ago. This is going to be another graphite drawing. With the last one Vanitas 10, I enjoyed the process of filling in the entire background with graphite shading and I decided to repeat the process with this new piece.
Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 04:34AM So this is the final design concept I came up with. It's a little bit stepping away from the original concept as well as from my previous version of vanitas theme, but it still conveys the sense of transient nature of beauty. I am going to add more fine details to the leaf and fill up the entire background with shading in graphite.
Monday, January 2, 2017 at 03:06PM The rendering of the model's body is pretty much finished. I am working on the hair. I added an extra inch to the top and elongated the piece vertically. Now I have a pretty good idea about the design of the piece and feel good about it. I gave up the idea of mixed media. I am going to finish this piece entirely in graphite.
Tuesday, December 27, 2016 at 03:26PM I have worked my way with the graphite pencil up to B3 at this point gradually building up the skin tones. I am not sure if I should go any darker than this. I will decide on that much later after seeing the overall balance of values. I am also having a second thought about the use of watercolor now. This is Bristol board. It is thick but there still might be inevitable warping if it was wet and dried. So I might try using charcoal for the background with extra texture added by acetone. This composition with the figure at the bottom is the right orientation of this piece and the final piece will be almost square like this image below.
Friday, December 23, 2016 at 08:27PM Just started working on a new piece for Vanitas series. I am thinking about trying a mixed media approach with this one, possibly graphite, watercolor and other mediums. Will see how it goes. So far I only worked on this with a H pencil. I am going to gradually build up the tones. I am envisioning this to be really dark and almost have a "mezzotint" look. I hope it works.
