This sketch is from Trying-to-Sketch-Pretty-Young-Women-So-They-Don’t-End-Up-Looking-Ancient-and_Monstrous Week—which is trickier than it sounds.
(People who draw already get what I’m getting at, but for normal people with normal hobbies: You draw by adding marks to the page, but a major part of how our culture codes both youth and beauty comes down to smooth marklessness. Thus, if you accurately capture all of the marks you actually see on an attractive woman’s face, the thing on the page will look like a scar-hatched, grotesque forest-hag come to devour children. More than elsewhere in sketching, the depiction of young attractive people requires enormous restraint, making each line do a shit-ton of work in expressing and implying what you want the viewer to see.)
Anyway, this is a failure from last week’s project, just less failed than the others—and that wasn’t why I was sharing it, anyway. My son pointed out that this really nicely visually captured the crinkly texture of how this style and type of hair feels. That really spoke to him, and so I share it here. It also may be of some interest to those tracking my progress in capturing hair in graphite.