Getting Down, Small and Dirty

With charcoal.

 I have no idea what training illustrators go through, but they seem to know how to draw small the best and are very skilled with watercolor. I have noticed that there are a lot of working and retired illustrators in Bloggersville and the painters of "Big Boys" are few if here at all?

My reference photograph

 Coming from the architectural design field, I was running away from small images drawn to quarter and three eighth inch scale. I was tired of the right side of my neck being stiff, my shoulders and back aching from being crunched up for hours and drawing with my nose. Coming back to art meant shaking loose with large size canvases and full body action. But it doesn't seem to work like that here--nor will it be that way next week. And so, 9 x 12 is the size to conquer this week.

 On 9 x 12, I tend to want to use pencil, not charcoal. Now charcoal comes in pencils, but the marks are darker and don't lift so easily--and charcoal is as much a subtractive medium as it is an additive. When working with it, I move between the two actions. That's imperative.

 What I have gotten so far working small on just one portrait is: forget the details and go for the dominating shapes, albeit shadows and negative space. My stick of vine isn't exactly helping me out. Where I unusually use roughly a one and a half inch piece, I find myself wanting to break that in half. Three quarters of an inch is pretty small to grasp with authority.

I struggle on. Observing. Calculating. Bungling. And fixing. But not the top one. This one I started too close to the top of the page and had to crop off a top curl along with the spiral line. The curl gave that head a better shape. The only fix is to take a closer look at what you don't like. This time getting the subject solidly placed on the page :

Zac looking a bit older than he was at the time of the reference photograph five years ago.
--Actually, closer to what  he looks like today.