Sometimes when you draw from life you can get so caught up in trying to make something look like something else, you forget that your drawing, in the end, will look like nothing other than itself. So all those careful smudges and erasures, which look just like the subtle shadows and lights in front of you, tend not to age well. In the presence of the model or scene they make sense, however in its absence they sort of look like mud (a possible reason for this is that smudges and erasures are not full drawing elements, and possibly more like something in painting, sort of how lines sometimes work as support for color in a painting, but as a general rule are not the stars of the show).
In my opinion the best way to avoid mud is line. Drawings need line. The real strength of a drawing is its line (or its careful avoidance of line, in any event, line is not far from theconversation). Smudging and erasing can make or break a drawing, but in the end (I think) line is the most important element in.
With that said, I am stepping up my line awareness. This has lead to some disasters in portraiture, but a sort of nice tree drawing. I definitely danced a bit in the mud, and have some finish issues (the bugs were starting to get to me), but I think it still goes into the win column (note the lines that sort of off set the mud issues at the bottom).
Tags: trees
