06 November 2020

Franz Kafka portrait

 


Krita recently added a charcoal brush set to it's tools and I decided to go way out of my comfort zone and do an entire portrait with them and smudging tools. This took about 6 hours to do which is not long for me. I have been encouraged to "loosen up"  by a couple people and this time they were referring to my drawings and paintings. I am not sure if this qualifies as loose.... it was loose for me at least. 

I do have a think for Kafka, I even travelled to Prague to see his museum. there are not many photos of him and I chose a younger version of him as  reference. I sort of wanted to show him more as a young man and not a great writer of disturbing stories. 

I a not not sure I really got a good likeness. I wanted to change his expression from the stagnant, dour one to something more engaging to the viewer. Nothing extreme just a shift in focus. I played with the lighting too. I tried not to be too obsessed with the hair as I tend to want to draw each one in ink and pencil. 

The charcoals were hard to control which helped keep me from my habit of going into super small details. 

I have included the original photo for comparison, not that my sketch lives up to such scrutiny. 



2 comments:

T' said...

I think it's very cool and you totally have the likeness! I like how it's mostly a little fuzzy; works very well that way. Only the tie seems a little too sharp. I'd say do a bunch more with those same tools to get a feel for them. I had the same issue with most of the digital watercolor brushes I ever tried but when I kept at it with the recent ones, they started to make sense. You're doing some great learning lately! Keep going!

Behemoth media said...

You are with about the tie, looking at it now it's a little too defined. I think I over compensated trying to make it seem more rounded than it needs to be. They eyes were hard to get right. I wanted to change the gaze and I did, but I kept making the iris too small at first.