帶有評論的木炭實時肖像素描/Real Time Portrait Sketch in Charcoal w Commentary

Hello, good morning. Hope you're all well today. I wanted to try something a little bit different today and show you my drawing in real time. And I'm going to try and do something relatively quick, maybe 20 minutes or so. And I also wanted to take the time to answer some of the questions that I've been getting on these videos. So I'm just going to get right into it here so this doesn't go on forever. This is not intended to be a tutorial, although I will probably talk a little bit about what I'm doing here and there. I'm just going to try and ramble and fill dead air for as long as it takes me to do this drawing, so we'll see how that goes. Materials, I get asked a lot about materials. This is vine charcoal. It's sometimes called willow charcoal, I think. The variety I use is actually a grapevine. I think, I believe I read somewhere it's not the same stuff that's in your charcoal pencil. It's going to behave in a lot more. It's very active on the page. You can almost paint with it, and I do paint with it a little bit. But it's sort of fragile. You have to be careful with it. You can't drag your hand through it. But it affords you a lot of opportunities to adjust and rethink your positions of things and take advantage of that. The paper is really completely ordinary. It's drawing paper, but there's really nothing special about it. It's not particularly slick like smooth Bristol, nor is it really textured all that much. It's just your standard paper. If there's some trick being performed, it's being performed by the charcoal. So if you're someone that's having a hard time getting your charcoal to really do anything for you after you've laid it down on your paper, it's probably because you're using compressed charcoal like a charcoal pencil. Or to further complicate the matter, you can get sticks of compressed charcoal, and that's not going to do the same thing either. So I would encourage you to look for vine charcoal. After you're done with it, you will need to spray it with a fixative because it's, again, it's so active. It's really easy to just wipe it off. So once you spray it with a fixative of some kind, they're just as durable as any other drawing. So it's... Yeah, you will need to spray it, though. This guy's got a beard. It seems like every drawing that I have done lately is someone with a beard. And some of those are commissions, I suppose. I'm choosing some of those references myself, but it's just totally unintentional. I guess there's just a lot of beards out there right now. Got some darkness here. And right now I'm just trying to get close with things. This is a style that searches a little bit for proper positions. But it's a medium that sort of allows for that. It's a very forgiving medium. So I'm just going to hint at things here. Sorry if I kind of trail off here and there. It's actually sort of difficult to get your brain to switch back and forth between dismantling the reference that you have in front of you and still speak about it in a coherent way. So yeah, there's that. I should probably say something about sound quality. I honestly don't know what the sound quality is going to sound like for this. Up until this point, I've been producing time-lapse videos, and I'm just detaching the audio and layering music over it. So I haven't really had to deal with things like my own voice. I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm currently shopping for a microphone, but right now I'm using the interior internal mic on the video camera, and those tend to not be the best. So I have actually heard that this particular camera has a decent microphone, so I'm hopeful. But if it's really terrible, if it's really terrible, you'll never see this. But if I sound kind of hollow, I'm working on that soon. Let's see here. What's going on there? I'm not going to get really detailed with this. Again, I just sketch here. Let's get some... Another thing a lot of people ask about is the reference photo. And I get that. I probably would want to see the reference photo too. And I will sometimes, but sometimes I don't. And one of the reasons why I don't is that I don't want to get too hung up on perfect placement of things. I mean, it is a portrait, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to get it to nail it. And sometimes I do nail it right away in lightning strikes, but sometimes I don't. And it's a longer effort, and I do have longer efforts that I spend three or four hours on. I worry about things like that a lot more, placement and likeness and such. But I don't so much with sketches. I tend to just relax a little bit more and loosen up. So if I don't show the reference, sometimes it's just because I'm really loose approach to it. And I'll do that sometimes. It's OK to get off the trail, so to speak. If you're a beginner, you'll hear over and over to draw what you see. And that's good advice. It is really good advice. But at some point, your progress becomes about sort of doing what you don't see or drawing what you don't see or your decision making. And sometimes those decisions take you away from your reference. So yeah,I don't want to get off too far. OK,so yeah. So now I'm going to do this thing where I brush through the drawing that I've established here. And that's going to do several things. There's areas like in here where I have a lot of direction and noise. At this stage of the drawing, the relative beginning stage, I kind of don't want that. I might actually do things later on that I get some of that back because some of it does look good. And some of that coarseness or grittiness that's in there is desirable. But at this point, it's distracting me. And I want to sort of take that noise out. And the other thing that it does is this will establish in these light areas. This will give me a little bit of a halftone. And it's because it gives me... It lets me come both up and down from it. I've taken what was totally the color of the paper and now I've given it some value. There's not a huge amount in there, but there's enough. So when I pluck highlights out of here, I can't pluck any highlights out of the color of the paper because there's no other value there. I don't know if that's obvious or not. But now I have something that I can bounce off of, so to speak. And this also gives me an opportunity to reevaluate my positions of things. Do I like where things are sitting? And if I don't, this is still active enough that I can make adjustments. So I'm going to do that now. If there's something that I... If I like where something is, I'm going to reinforce it. If I don't like where it is, of course I'm going to try and adjust it. But this particular stage gives me an opportunity to do that. And it's... I will often switch to a charcoal pencil at this point, but I'm just... So I'm charcoal. And this nose a little bit. Let's see. There's some nice... I want to... Oh, darker there. I tend to hit the corners of the mouth. And at the beginning, anyway, I tend to downplay the mouth a little bit because it's notoriously hard to get right. So I think that's a little bit dislodging and that charcoal would kind of build paint with it a little bit. At this point, I'm going to try and get some of that grit and some of that noise. I want to try and get a little bit of that aggressive with my application. And I'm not going to manipulate it because I feel like my positions are a little bit more... I don't think anything looks too far off. I don't want to do too much to this ear over here. I'm just going to kind of let it... Let's see. This is a little bit too much. Let's see here. Pluck out a few little highlights and I'm probably going to call this finished. I just kind of like that it's... I kind of like where it sits right now. It's got some interesting things going on. So there are some nice highlights, though, that I need to get into your response here. I don't want to get too overindulgent and crazy with these, though. Let's move there real quick. Yeah, so anyway, I'm going to wrap this up and I've clearly run out of things to say anyway. So thank you again for watching and I hope to see you on the next one. Take care.