Portrait - Week 3

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This is starting to feel pretty overworked to me. I was told to back up and make my shadow shapes more distinctly separate (and not grade them into the light), but now they're just feeling really harsh and loud to me. So I don't know. Feels like everything I do is a complete crap shoot lately. The good thing is I think I have gotten pretty close to her likeness after 9 hours. I've looked at this thing upside down and two kinds of backwards in the mirror and it doesn't offend me terribly from any angle--proportion wise, anyway.

But learning to approach drawing another way feels a lot like being indoctrinated in a new religion. There is a very specific set of rules and philosophies to follow that are presented as ultimate truth. And I guess you just have to go with it and live it full force before you can decide what really makes sense to you. Right now I'm in obedience mode and that could last a while--it'll give me a solid base to start from anyway, which I know I don't have right now. Right now my approach is to just go for it, and whatever happens (good or bad) often feels like a complete and utter accident. Having a natural knack for drawing only gets me so far. So, while this is incredibly frustrating and the rigidity is hard for me to swallow (because I'm truly a go-with-the-flow kind of personality), it's all good. I'm doing it. But I'm not gonna say it isn't rife with some serious growing pains. It is. And the pains are not because I'm arrogant about my abilities. I have quite the opposite problem. It's just that restructuring my brain is exhausting and confusing and I just don't like it--every other time. Sometimes it's alright ("na na na na na na na na na na, every other time"---LFO. taking it back to the good ol' early years of high school ;).

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