M2M Day 49: Drawing in the dark
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For December, my goal is to draw a realistic self-portrait with only pencil and paper.
In most of my posts, I tend to be pretty positive (i.e. “Whoa, today went better than expected…”, “I’m really pleased with today’s progress…”, “I can’t believe how good this is…”, etc.).
This is mostly because I’m very bullish on this entire project.
However, in my past three posts (I made a mistake, Intentionally defacing my self-portrait, and Fighting for photorealism), I’ve tried to interrupt this trend, and share some of the day-to-day challenges I face.
While I am still very positive about this project, and happily take on the micro-challenges, I thought sharing some of these things would be more interesting than writing about how every day is always better than the last.
Anyway, continuing with this theme, today, I want to share an interesting struggle.
The Light Situation in San Francisco
For some (perhaps, legal) reason, most apartments in San Francisco don’t have overhead lights in their main living areas. Usually, apartments only have overhead lights in the bathroom and (sometimes) the kitchen, which is the case for my apartment.
As a result, the rest of my apartment is lit via Ikea floor lamps, which, although they do a 90% good job, it turns out, at night, there’s just not enough light for detail-oriented drawing.
During the sketching phase of my self-portrait, I didn’t need to see precise tone, so sketching at night was no problem.
However, now that I’m trying to carefully model the lights/shadows of my face, I need more light.
I considered drawing in the bathroom, but this isn’t entirely comfortable. Especially because I was worried that the portrait would get wet/damaged on the sink, whose counter is the most viable drawing area.
Since, without deconstruction, the kitchen table doesn’t fit through the bathroom door (I tried…), I needed to find somewhere else to work tonight.
I ended up across the street from my apartment at a well-lit coworking space, which was great for drawing, but not-so-great for picture-taking. The abundance of overhead lights meant that, however I positioned my body, I was always casting a shadow on the portrait.
Thus, once I finished drawing, I came back to my dark apartment to snap a photo.
After my light-seeking adventure, here’s what I was able to accomplish.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
