I was writing last month about choices on my Patreon blog and my mind keeps coming up with examples even though we’ve moved on. This one is about compositional choice. And we never really move away from compositional choices…
First, nope, I didn’t suddenly get tired and give up on the rest of the head of this actor in a show I was watching…
I made a choice at the beginning of the sketch that because I couldn’t see the full head and backwards cap on screen (one of the drawbacks of not sketching from life!) I wasn’t going to fudge and draw it anyway.
(Not so little secret: I have to really work on the bills of billed caps so I definitely need a live 3-D model in front of me when I’m sketching one! But you know this because I comment on it all the time here. And every year in the run up to the Minnesota State Fair you’d see me out and about trying to sketch billed caps and the heads wearing them.)
I could have hidden the absence of the reference of the cap by simply moving everything over to the right and drawing off the right side of the recto page “suggesting” the cap was really over “there.”
However I wanted that eye and the rest of the profile close to the focal point at the bottom left the Rule of Thirds gives us. It isn’t quite there because at the last moment I lost my nerve and moved the eye position up just a bit because I knew I wouldn’t get the chin and all that great stubble in otherwise.
More choices.
Make choices that make your drawing practice interesting and fun for you.
