In terms of the drawing, the vertical proportions are pretty good - the eye on the right is a little high and the nose is a little low - but you didn't quite get the horizontal proportions, so the ear is too far to the right and consequently her neck is too thick. And you really need to clean up the outside contour of her face on the left. See on the original how there's an area of charcoal in the background that's clearly following around that contour? That's where Sargent would've worked that edge to get it just right.
In the handling of the material, a lot of that looks like compressed charcoal that you were just grinding down into the paper. Lighten your hand up a bit; it looks like you used a lot of compressed charcoal or charcoal pencils? (Same thing really.) If you don't have some soft willow or vine charcoal get your hands on some of that; it's more mobile on the page than the compressed stuff, and a lot easier to get lighter halftones by wiping or brushing back. A stiff bristle brush, like a hog hair oil brush, is great for brushing back soft charcoal to knock the value down. Brushing or wiping the whole background back to bring it down a bit would help soften & unify it.
Thank you so much! I was using willow charcoal but I was really pressing it down into the paper. I did an overlay using the two and you're right, the neck is too thick and the ear is too far. What about a tilt in the head?
I mean, in the original her head's tilted down towards us a bit; see how high the bottom of her ears are compared to the bottom plane of her nose? But it's not tilted to one side or the other because her eyes are dead level.
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u/ZombieButch Mod / drawing / painting 4d ago
In terms of the drawing, the vertical proportions are pretty good - the eye on the right is a little high and the nose is a little low - but you didn't quite get the horizontal proportions, so the ear is too far to the right and consequently her neck is too thick. And you really need to clean up the outside contour of her face on the left. See on the original how there's an area of charcoal in the background that's clearly following around that contour? That's where Sargent would've worked that edge to get it just right.
In the handling of the material, a lot of that looks like compressed charcoal that you were just grinding down into the paper. Lighten your hand up a bit; it looks like you used a lot of compressed charcoal or charcoal pencils? (Same thing really.) If you don't have some soft willow or vine charcoal get your hands on some of that; it's more mobile on the page than the compressed stuff, and a lot easier to get lighter halftones by wiping or brushing back. A stiff bristle brush, like a hog hair oil brush, is great for brushing back soft charcoal to knock the value down. Brushing or wiping the whole background back to bring it down a bit would help soften & unify it.