Skull Study #2 - wow, I did the bad aspect ratio thing!!!

Used a big piece of green pastel paper this time and the square sticks of charcoal/white chalk that look like Conte crayons but aren't. A little ways in, after I was already well into the charcoal rendering stage, I noticed my skull structure s very squashed down and stretched out sideways - in fact just like a badly encoded youtube video in the wrong aspect ratio!! Then I realized it's becasue of the long landscape format of the paper - in fact I was concerned with making the drawing fit the proportions - that's why I removed the lower jaw and placed it beside the skull. But I must have unconsciously altered the proportions of the boxes I drew. Bizarre! The actual skull looks tall and stately, my drawing looks almost like an ape or something, all short and squat and long (in fact it reminds me in a way of the creature from Alien Resurrection).

But enough chalk (sticks or blocks) drawing for me!! God it's such messy stuff, it gets all over everything including your hands, and then smudges and fingerprints show up all over the clean paper part of the drawing. Yuck! Don't like it. The pastel pencils are alright though - not nearly as messy, and I believe the conte crayons will be nice too. 2 chalk drawings from the last 2 days, and I don't know where to keep them - don't want to put any other drawings on top of them or they'll get all messy on the back and then infect other drawings they come into contact with. Really need to try the skim milk thing (hope it works better than steam, which I tried long ago and was a total joke).

I do like the way I boxed everything up for this drawing - just had to do a little quick calculation to figure out how to box a skull without the lower jaw, and then I estimated a box for the jaw itself (was pretty far off though - had to correct significantly later). Many more skull drawings to come - but enough for now - time to move on.

The 1st skull study looks nicer, is more controlled because it was with chalk pencils - the 2nd though it's twice as big or more, looks sloppy (finished up with the pencils to tighten it a bit). But it is more accurate in some ways - the front of the cheekbones is more correct in particular - I had a revelation comparing my 1st study to the skull that the shape of that part of the cheekbones is very important to the look of the cheek in a very emaciated or ripped person - that tilted triangular plane that defines the upper limit of the soft cheek area.