jayme del rosario | sketchblog

In working with all these still life subjects I’ve ambitiously set-up for myself, I’m having trouble juggling and following through with the documentation process. So please bare with me, I’m sure I will improve.  I forgot to take pictures of the block-in process for this still life subject so I’ll discuss it briefly.

I began by drawing directly with a brush in an attempt to approach this painting “loosely” as I learned through Sarah Lamb’s workshop. Being more comfortable with getting the drawing “right” first – usually with pencil then transferring, I wanted to mix things up a bit this time. This confidence also springs from the fact that still life subjects are often more forgiving than the figure. Regardless of the drawing tool, it was the usual block-in stuff where I began with a loose envelope, then slowly broke this down to straight block-in lines with a lot of triangulation plus usage of vertical and horizontal plumbs “by eye” – and a knitting needle.

I resolved the drawing as well as I could. Once I had something accurate enough to build the underpainting on, I went in with brown and scumbled a very thin wash. This took place early on as I tried to treat the drawing and underpainting with a more mass drawing approach rather than a linear approach. With this technique there is more juggling with the drawing and so I continue to work on the drawing careful not to let the medium get too sloppy. The important things I keep in mind is to always improve the drawing, not lose the drawing by painting and covering lines I want to keep and I make sure things remain thin. I plan to build paint up in the lights especially since there is a lot of texture on the metal bowl and ladle.

Still Life with Garlic, underpainting

My underpainting is really a monochromatic wash-in though I used two colors, a warm and a cool, to map out the temperature changes. I first simplified things by starting with the darkest dark and moved from there. The neutral gray ground played a very strong role in how I simplified my values, slowly building up the underpainting from three values, on to four, five, etc until I was satisfied in suggesting the volume of the objects. The underpainting was “done” once I worked out the overall value and temperature relationships of the entire composition as well as I could.

Blocking in is a great approach to drawing anything from the figure to a landscape or a still life. You break down the large shapes and work broadly paying attention to gesture, angles and distances. If you get the tilts and distances right, proportional problems shouldn’t haunt you and if you pay attention to perspective, you’re golden. It is a more linear approach to starting a painting or drawing — as opposed to mass drawing where the large masses are layed in very quickly.  There is a cursory block-in set-up with mass drawing but it is very brief.  Shapes are established very quickly and the block-in is used to set-up the gesture and general proportions of the subject.  An analysis of shapes and their individual axis play a larger role rather than the linear tilts of each form. But don’t be mistaken, they are one and the same and knowing how to think in linear mass can only be an advantage. It’s the difference between lifting with your back or learning how to lift with your legs, both will do the job but the former is likely to do more harm. Here’s a block-in of last week’s figure pose.

Figure Block-In

The side drawing was a critique from Michael Grimaldi where he analyzed the rhythm and movement of the structural forms making an excellent parallel to a previous drapery workshop which the full-time/core program students took part in last month at JCSA, aka Janus.  More on the block-in in a future post.