An overworked sketch is lifeless.  Sometimes the objective in the design makes me blindly push well beyond what actually works best in terms of finish so I must to pay attention to avoid going past that point and then spend a lot of time diminishing something what was already working well.

Enter now this family sketch. It had lots of appeal to me as a composition and I decided to sketch it in pencil. It wouldn’t work as a painting. To fend off the tendency to overwork drawings  (it’s just too fun to do that) I had a plan. I’d keep a sharp pencil and do no soft shading. All crisp lines.

The girls claim I made their hair look better than it was.

First pass, I positioned each element lightly. Then I went over the whole grouping and dialed it in with detail. Then I did a quick polish on each face. Then I did finish work on each face.

It was not a success. The finish work was not lively so much as novice level cruddy. So I went back in with standard techniques.

It was still unsatisfyingly primitive and teetered into the deadness of “overworked”.

I went through and hardened the outlines with no intention of filling in shade detail in the clothing or furniture.

Near the end of the day, I took photos and showed those to the mom. She was encouraging because she saw none of the faults that concerned me and the children looked right to her. So I went to the stores in search of erasure tools for some polish work I wanted to do.

In the end, I just whittled an eraser that I already had. A bit of trimming with a box knife and it was just what I needed. I did shore up my dismal  selection of gum erasers.

These are phone camera images shot in the studio cave. They’ll have to do until I can get a backing on the drawing and photograph it in good light. That means a trip across the river into the dreaded big city.

After I took these photos I did some refinements that brought life back into the faces. Then I sharpened my pencil and added a little something that should be fun for future viewers.

The design of the grouping and the limited refinement is to solidify the sense of family. The faces are clear. The hands are shaded in also. Personality and deeds make family work. So Faces and the expression of “doing” – hands – are arranged so that the children are encircled in arms. Their little hands are each to themselves mostly, but the older the individual, the more enfolding the arms and hands are. I love the way that works here.

Then, in the teeniest of letters I printed in the names of each person multiple times throughout, always on the person or proximal to that person.

I just noticed that I don’t have a good shot of all the Larissa names. That’ll have to wait till the better camera.