Portrait Practice #07 and a first step in sculpting

Hot, hazy and dry just about sums up the weather in the city at the moment. In such stifling conditions, I found it much easier to draw than to paint. So it was game on for my seventh portrait drawing practice piece. It is based on a photo of Katniss Everdeen (as played by Jennifer Lawrence) that I saw on a magazine cover promoting the first movie of The Hunger Games quadrilogy.

Portrait Practice #07 - Katniss Everdeen

For this piece, I tried to concentrate on shading i.e. using extreme light and dark values to form the facial features. I wasn't too happy with the results as the shading was still patchy in places. So either my technique is wrong or I am doing it correcttly but need more practice. That being said, I was pretty pleased with how the eyes turned out as they seemed to make the drawing more lifelike. 

Hunger Games promo photo of Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence)

Perhaps one thing I could have done to make the drawing have more depth was to shade the area around her head with matte black. But leaving the surrounding area unshaded was an easy decision to make as I have no idea how to make the border bewtween a matte black background and the head appear seamless. In the end, I lightened the shading throught the portrait drawing to compensate.  

Comparison between a slightly scaled up drawing versus the black and white reference photo

As I have mentioned before, my portrait drawings are part of the overall sculpting process namely the initial concept sketches that are to serve as a blueprint of sorts for my future sculpts. This being the case, I felt that I needed to make a proper start in sculpting per se hence I will be immersing myself in a book by Katherine Dewey titled Creating Lifelike Figures in Polymer Clay (see photo below).

My journey into sculpting begins with this book

Why polymer clay and not other sculpting materials? Well, although I was tempted to use some self-hardening materials available on the market, I didn't want to work under a time-limit when sculpting. It would probably take me days just to get any particular part of a sculpture looking half-decent so to have a sculpting material that hardened in a few hours may result in, for example, a face sculpt that looks like a horses's ass. We wouldn't want that happening now would we?