This project was probably one of my favorites to complete and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. I’ve always enjoyed working with charcoal and I think it’s safe to say that that’s the media I work the most in after pencil, so working in black chalk and conte was a safe zone, but I also learned a lot of new things on the way. This drawing required a lot of very tiny marks and my paper was quite toothy, so I had to overcome the extra texture by smudging and crushing the conte so that the entire paper was covered in shades, not just the tooth. I also struggled a lot with proportion during this project because of the challenging shapes that Raphael used when making the facial features on the Apostles. The noses were particularly hard to capture due to their awkward angles and shapes on the original piece itself. Personally, I understood Raphael’s marks and replicating them weren’t as hard to me as I thought it was going to be, because although a lot of it was quite gestural and loose, his marks had a purpose and very few were there just to add ‘fluff’. Much of the time I was working, I was struggling with the values and overall shape of each figure, because since they were both faces, I couldn’t mess up or skip over minor flaws since it would show clearly in the finished product. During this project, I learned about the value of shading with just hatching as well as putting as many lines on the paper as was necessary (I found myself putting too much value often!). The Old Masters project was especially special to me because I want to expand on portraits and my play pages in my sketchbook are on facial features (one was in charcoal!) and this allowed for an end product after those play pages. I will most likely use what I’ve learned during this project in my later studies of the human face and Raphael’s marks and values have taught me a lot about how Italian Renaissance artists slowly mastered the human body’s form. A high resolution picture can be found at:
collections.ashmolean.org/collection/search/per_page/25/offset/0/sort_by/relevance/object/38092
1 Comment
MM
11/9/2018 04:52:39 am
How cool to this is whole process! Don't forget the side-by-side of the original and your copy.
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Authormy name is shreya. Archives
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