Charcoal drawing - Claudia

On Friday I finished another 5 week charcoal figure study....and here it is. Sometimes you get models that move a lot and sometimes you get models like Claudia who doesn't move at all even in a difficult position. I mean you have to allow for some twisting and similar, but in general Claudia has been so good. If anyone's wondering how she managed to hold her hands like that for 75h, she had them resting in loops of fishing line hanging from the ceiling.

This drawing, similar to my last one of Alberto, has a lot of direct light and not many shadow shapes. I found this incredibly challenging, since the shapes of the halftones are so diffuse and they change a lot depending on lighting conditions, movement of the model etc. If you have a lot of dark shadow shapes you tend to be able to see the forms faster and then you simply soften edges or leave them harder to distinguish what form you want. When you only deal with halftones though, it's basically like just dealing with the outlines and the transitions and therefore it's so much slower and more difficult to see the forms. I apprached this drawing in a different way to my last though and I think it worked a lot better for me. I found that if I applied a light layer of charcoal everywhere and then erased out the absolute lightest parts, instead of trying to leave the lightest parts by simply drawing around them, I managed to wrap my head around the shapes much easier. I don't know why this worked so much better for me, since it's pretty much the same thing but it just did.