Week 44 was another “Chiaroscuro Faces Week.”
My son characterized several sketches from this week as looking like “ghosts unwillingly dissolving.”
With that second sketch he noted that “the background shadows and the face shadows really look cut from the same cloth. That’s really hard to do but I think you did it there.”
I see what he’s saying, but in this case it was totally unintentional. It was only about a week later that I was clicking through various screenshots of old drawing instructional books I found on Pinterest, and saw a discussion of the problem of hard lines in primarily tonal studies. In both cases it was the use/absence of hard lines that got the effect that made them striking (on the upper sketch the left edge of the face has a hard delineation while the right is allowed to “dissolve”; on the lower the face is framed entirely in shadow, with no precise hard outline).
I wouldn’t have put all that together without his feedback. For my part, I just liked the emotions that wound up on the page.