Critique #6: Leyla F.

Yves-Olivier Mandereau, Teaching Assistant

I really appreciate the atmospheric quality of your drawing.  It’s usually pretty hard to get a sense of environment from a drawing, so you’ve achieved that already, and I think that’s a pretty good thing. I think though that within that environment, it would be a good thing to think about composition. What do you want me, as the viewer to see, and how do you want me to see it?  How do I navigate the page? With the face on the left, I see it, and then there isn’t anything else. So how do you create depth of space to help me move around the drawing?

Another note is that if you’re having trouble getting the charcoal on the paper, there are lots of different things you can try. You can try a different kind of paper, or even, instead of using the charcoal just as an additive, think about it as a form of subtracting.  So you can get different types of charcoals, and experiment with getting it really, really dark in some places, and using an eraser to lighten up form.

So instead of creating shadows, you’re playing with light. That will certainly give you different textures and a new way of working throughout the drawing.

Overall, I think you have a great ability to render. The face looks like a face. A lot of times in just black and white drawings, faces can kind of distort and not look like faces.  But what you have here looks like you, and that’s a great skill. So keep on doing that, and practicing rendering of real life objects.