On a recent trip to the Indonesian island of Bali I met an elderly Balinese who owned a laundry service that I used. When travelling I like to keep an eye out for fascinating people who would make for interesting portrait possibilities.
Made, her name, fit the bill perfectly: Her hastily wrapped headress that barely contained her sprawling locks of hair and the money roll that she carried in her earlobe piercing provided excellent fodder for a character study.
The finished tonal drawing was completed in my studio where I worked it up from a photograph that Made graciously posed for.
For this lesson on line I used my finished tonal drawing as my reference; the photograph, alas, is hopelessly lost somewhere in my studio otherwise I would have worked from it.
A linear drawing can be a work of art in and of itself; the linear drawing can also be directed as a preparatory drawing for a more sustained work such as a painting. The term for a preparatory drawing is cartoon. The cartoon is transferred onto the painting service using either graphite transfer paper or pummicing the back of the cartoon with charcoal dust and then using it as you would carbon paper.
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A cartoon is quite often a constructive drawing where the focus of line is on determining form rather than expressing movement. (The November lesson will focus on line as movement.)
Working with sharpened sanguine conté on a quarter sheet of Fabriano Ingres drawing paper I quickly established the Arabesque. The Arabesque is the entire outside shape of the head including the headress, it is better not to include minor elements such as the dangling locks of hair. After checking that my overall height/width proportion was correct I then lightly indicated the placement of the brow-ridge and the base of the nose.
When striking the arabesque architectonically succinct lines proffer a sense of solid form. What I mean by this is that I employ short straight lines to describe rounded shapes. Keep your initial lines quite light, my lines shown here are significantly darker than I would normally use; the reason for this is so that you can see what I have done here.
