My son advised I share this sketch of Conan the Barbarian (taken from the “What is Best in Life…?” scene—video at the bottom of this post) because I could also share my first stab at it, from back in September:
Here is the actual still I was working from:
Why is my latest sketch better than my first stab?
Well, first off, I’ve loosened up on my fixation with line, and leaned more deeply into value. Like, honestly: there is no such thing as a “nose” as a discrete part of the face. It isn’t like the eye. The thing we call a “nose” is this notional region in the middle of the face defined by areas of shadow and highlight. Every time you use a line anywhere in drawing a nose, you end up with something cartoonish. Lips have largely the same issue: unless someone is wearing pretty heavy makeup, then the lip really isn’t delineated in the real world nearly so sharply as it is in our minds. In my latest sketch I used almost no lines on Conan’s face; I built them up using layers of graphite, and also paid attention to the levels of value within each value, making more intermediate stages. It helped to think of it in this manner: that I’m “building up” the face, not “drawing” it.
But it’s more than that, because I’ve also (just barely) gotten smarter about composition. The first drawing got problematic because I tried to capture the entire scene as shown in that frame. This entire film is full of beautifully composed shots, every frame worth its own Frank Frazetta oil painting. I didn’t have the space for that on the page, nor the skill in my hand and eye. In the newer sketch my reach doesn’t nearly exceed my grasp so terribly: I had room to capture just seated Conan at the proper scope and detail, and I did so.
And, finally, I didn’t shy away from the awkward face Conan is making in my screen grab; I leaned into the awkwardness (rather than trying to smooth it out and glass it over), and as such got much closer to capturing something sort of lovely and ineffable in his posture. I don’t know what that is, but I see it more and more often in my more recent sketches, when I get them right. It’s present in the lame buck, and the close-up of the thinking man’s gorilla, and the Florida turtle. In my head, I think of it as capturing the dignity of the thing in the world, being just exactly what it is.
Anyway, this is the final Sketch of the Week for 2024. Thanks for playing along!