TA Critique: Adam T.
You’ve accomplished some amazing things with this drawing. Right off the bat, I can tell that you’re very conscious of where you put your darks and your lights. And you’re right, it is really tricky to establish all those different greys and shadows within the drawing.
A good way that I’ve found to think about it is to imagine a scale of 1-10. One being your lightest light, the white of the paper, and 10 being your darkest dark, which is nothing but thick, applied black charcoal. In between there, imagine about 10 different levels of grey and shadow. So you have light shadows, and dark shadows depending on how the light is working.
To make that effect work in the drawing, you already mentioned yourself the technique of rubbing the charcoal in with your fingers, you’re doing a great job of that in the background. Bringing in a kneader eraser, that grey kind of mushy eraser too, will really help to kind of smooth out those shadows, and help you get a smoother and broader range. That will also help you accomplish things like texture, a realistic look in your drawing.
You’re doing some texture really well here with, take the difference between your hair and your skin. Right off the bat, we can tell that those are different materials, different textures, a different feel. Things like your shirt, it almost looks like the same texture as your skin. Applying in these subtle shadows, and making it look more real that way will really do some great work.
Something you’re doing really well is understanding when to have subtle light. Look inside your drawing’s eyes and underneath the nose, that’s a nice, really realistic light where you’re capturing all of these different levels of greys, and all of those nice highlights and deep shadows. So if you incorporate what you know there into the rest of your drawing, I think the whole thing will come together really nicely.