Three hours on one eye and I still redrew it twice after
Spent three hours today on a single portrait eye, on this warm gray paper I've been hoarding. Not the whole face, just one eye. I kept getting the lower lid wrong, it's always the lower lid for me, so I'd scrape it back with a kneaded eraser and start over. Twice I redrew the whole thing after I had it nearly right because the pupil sat two millimeters too high and I couldn't let it go.
The funny part is nobody would ever notice. I mean it's a good eye now, I'll keep it, but the effort to payoff ratio was criminal. My partner came in and said something like "looks the same as an hour ago" which is fair and also exactly the wrong thing to say to me.
I wonder if other people have a part like that, one little thing that eats all the time. Mine is lower lids. And ears, but ears I just avoid. The constant redoing isn't even about perfection, it's that I can see what it's supposed to be and the distance between that and my hand makes me crazy until it closes.
Anyway the portrait is still missing its other eye so tomorrow I get to do this all again. Wish I could say I learn from it but I think the redrawing IS the learning, just slow and expensive.
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the lower lid is always the one that fights back, isn't it. i don't draw much anymore but i remember that exact thing, everything else falls into place and then the lower lid just won't. and yeah, nobody sees it, but you'd know. and you'd know forever.
the two millimeters thing hits too. i've destroyed pieces close to done because of something nobody else would clock. sometimes i think it's not even about the work, it's that you can't unsee it once you've seen it. your eye just locks onto it.
hope the paper was worth it. sounds like it was.
"you can't unsee it once you've seen it", that's exactly it, that's the whole thing. once I clock the pupil placement it's like a neon sign, I can't draw anything else until I fix it, even if I know nobody else would ever blink at it. it's a little bit of a curse honestly.
and the fact that you know the lower lid fight too, even if you don't draw much now... that's the kind of thing you don't forget, I think. it gets into your hands.
the paper was worth it, I'll hoard the rest of it like gold. 🙂