Traditional Art practice: Reinforcing skills - Still Life with a Skull / Plaster Head (Week 9)

This week's focus revolved around plaster head/skull studies with still life.

I decided to pick the skull still life as this reflected my work of past weeks, which was really strong, believing that my skull final render was stronger than my plaster head final render.

Additionally, having more organic objects, i.e: the flowers, in this composition helped me have different value changes and focus on different shading techniques such as circling, basic shading and shading outside the object.

The thing I found most difficult about this task was getting the book to be the darkest value, I had to use a graphite 9B pencil to get my effect due to taking a long time to build up the tone, furthermore, it took a really long time to erase too, however the result paid off nicely, giving it reflections, indicating a glossy/satin object and giving it nice detail.

If I were to do anything differently, I would focus on trying to nail down all the main details, specifically on the skull, this way I wouldn't have to focus too much on incorporating this into my render and block shading.

Overall, this term I have learned how to efficiently render objects, which has improved a lot since last year. Moreover, it has shown me the importance of drawing things accurately, which, in turn, shows me that drawing things inaccurately does not make the overall composition or final render look how it is supposed to when it is finished and can be jarring when the perspective of something isn't correct.