Working through the rust

pencils

Somehow I've let myself go another stretch of months without doing any sketching. This past week or so, when I thought I'd be away for a few days but then wasn't, and when I was between seasons for umpiring, and when work-work was minimal, I finally cracked open the sketchbook again.

Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, it hasn't gone well. I did a few attempts at portraits that will never see the light of day because I dislike them (one got ripped up pretty good), and then I thought I was getting somewhere with a drawing of Ming-Na Wen. Ming-Na was a topic of conversation between me and my friend Stacey a couple weeks back as one of our common "age-appropriate TV crushes," so when I started to run into trouble on that one—I just wasn't getting the spacing right on the eyes, plus they weren't flat enough, plus the nose was too wide, plus plus plus—after a couple of erasures and revisions that still didn't look right I was in that headspace where I couldn't tell if I was right that it looked wrong or if I was just in hypercritical mode. So I took a photo and texted Stacey. "Is this recognizable at all?" I figured if she didn't even know it was Ming-Na then I'd know for sure it was time to start over.

She ID'd the subject OK, but since she still posed it as a question—Is that Ming-Na—I put it down and let it be for a couple days, then I started over. This attempt is much better, but I admit to cheating—I had so much trouble with spacing the prior time I used a light panel on the photo I was working from this time to spot the features first. Sadly, I'm using this new pad of "marker paper," which turns out to be enough unlike the marker pad I had before that handles pencils well in addition to inks (a very nice surface from Bee Paper that I'll have to hunt for again) that I'm not getting the tones I want. This paper just won't handle soft pencil any differently than hard pencil and it smudges differently and my blending stomps don't do what I want them to, so I think I'm going to switch gears and turn this into an ink drawing.

But in case it goes horribly wrong I wanted to preserve what I've got, at least as a scan that I can play with later should it all fall apart.

Assuming it doesn't, the final product will go on the sketchbook page, which is still awaiting rescans of some older stuff to go with the more recent selections already there.