Portrait challenge – graphite under-drawing

I took my last charcoal drawing and overlaid it on the original photograph. My drawing was off in a couple of ways:

• I didn’t make her face wide enough
• I didn’t make her lower lip and chin large enough

Other than that, the right-hand side (as you’re looking at it, not HER right-hand side) was dead-on. Not bad since I haven’t done a portrait in years. Anyway, I fixed it by getting some landmarks placed correctly and re-drawing it directly on the canvas with an HB pencil, sprayed it with fixative and it’s drying as I type this.

I emphasized the darkest points and some landmarks so that they’d show through as I painted. Once I did that, I filled in some darker shadows so I could be sure I got the bottom of the chin in the right spot and I proceeded to draw in the eyes, nose, and mouth. I pretty much kept the hair the way the charcoal drawing was.

Her right eye (her right, not your right) isn’t really that droopy – she has dark make-up under her eye (well, either that or some REALLY dark skin and really thick lashes) – my pencil was getting dull from the shading work on the canvas. In case you’ve never used a pencil on canvas, I can tell you that the texture of the canvas really wears down your pencil in no time flat. And stuff.

I offset her on the canvas to make the composition interesting. I’m considering doing an “unfinished” look to the surrounding features and background, a la much of the work of John Howard Sanden- yeah, right, as if I could pull THAT off. I’ll be happy if this doesn’t look like a paint-by-numbers or like I’m some sort of hack. Well, I AM a hack, just that I try not to let that get out too often.

Truth be told, I’m afraid to do this. What if I screw it up? What if I can’t get the values right? Or the colors? Or the background doesn’t recede properly? Or I don’t finish in time. I’ve got tonight and tomorrow to finish this or I’ve missed a deadline I’ve committed to. And I can’t let that happen. And I’m afraid to ruin this thing. Oh, well, only one thing to do… the copyrighted “break the toy” phrase to the rescue!