Light Like Weight Like Burden

Every once in a great while the stars line up and I get to work on some art. This is one the creative ways I used my family-free time in the last week.

In my notes and sketches, I imagined this at first at a character from my book, but explored the idea of light as something to press down on you. I might continue to explore that, as I don’t think I exactly accomplished that here. But I still like the piece so I thought I’d share it.

I used a .3 and .5 mechanical pencil for the initial sketches, vine charcoal for the live sketch, and then conte, charcoal, and chalk for the main piece. I created the base with the conte (just one tone for simplicity) in hatches and then smoothed that out before adding charcoal and then finally the chalk. For the eye lashes, I tried to mix a 4B pencil with a little chalk (because I’d forgotten a lesson I learned the hard way about mixing pencil with charcoal), but repaired it with a pointy bit of vine.

When I was finished the figure, I preserved it with a workable fixative (three layers lightly applied) before adding the clouding in the background.

I was worried throughout the piece that I’d screw it up somewhere, so I took pictures throughout the process, documenting my good decisions and bad ones.

Thank you, Danielle, for your patience.
-CG