I suppose my thought process began before I even took this class. I knew that this was a moment I wanted to capture right when it happened, and I jotted down a little blurb about it once I got back to my phone. I plan to keep revisiting it as my techniques develop. I spent about 15 hours on the entire project. I began by researching poses for the figure on the left and looking at various expressions of women talking and interacting. I also did some gesture drawing to warm up and help finalize my composition. This took around two and a half hours. The rest of the time was made up of working on the final piece. I found that three-hour increments worked best for me. I would also take breaks to experiment and sketch on scrap paper.

For the figure on the left, I had a friend sit in a pose inspired by Eugène Delaplanche’s statue, Eve avant le péché. I did some gesture drawings of that but mostly worked from a photo. I did not ask my friend to pose nude, so I also used photos of the original statue. For the figure on the right, I observed myself. For both faces, I referenced people in the background of various photos from my trip.

The most successful aspect of this piece is my “drawing” with erasers. I really enjoy the technique of carving shapes out of charcoal or graphite that I’m starting to develop. I think it creates very rounded shapes and helps me stay loose. Although the steam could use some more experimentation and refining, I think aspects of it turned out well. I pushed into the paper with my kneaded eraser which created interesting and organic shapes.

I really struggled with the faces. I was going for expressive, but I feel that they came out more cartoonish. Moving forward, I want to practice more non-neutral facial expressions. These faces are also a lot smaller than what I’m used to practicing when I’m trying to fully render them – I struggled with how much detail to show. The perspective also looks off to me. I didn’t find or create a solid reference for the space and was trying to depict it from memory, and I think that shows. This was also a time management issue – I spent so much time working out the figures that the setting/background was rushed.

If I were to do this project again, aside from hopefully improving on the unsuccessful parts, I would incorporate color. I originally intended to but got intimidated by it. I have not practiced with conte as much as I would have liked, and I was worried that I’d make it look muddy. On a similar note, I’ve also learned that I need to allot myself even more time for warmup drafts – my drawing sessions were much more productive and satisfying when I was able to get the anxious scribbles out of my system first.