I was inspired to sketch our 16th President after reading Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln. I got the idea for the title of the piece from something Carl Sandburg said in his trilogy on the life of Lincoln.
17"x14" Brown Conte on Paper by Mary Jane Mara, after an 1863 photograph by Alexander Gardner
Lincoln was 54 years old on November 9, 1863, when he stood for my drawing's souce photo. The Civil War was raging well into in its second year with no surety at all that the North would win. But, on April 9, 1865, Lee finally surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. On April 11 Lincoln promoted voting rights for blacks to an audience that included John Wilkes Booth. On the 14th, Booth shot him. On the 15th, he died. In December, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and slavery was abolished in the U.S.
A Digital Reference, an Abbreviated Grid – and a Big Mirror
Once I found a suitable image of Lincoln on the Web, rather than print what was bound to be a low-resolution copy, I decided to work directly from my laptop screen (gallery image 2). This was a first for me, and I have to say, it has its advantages.
- I took the image into Adobe Photoshop and enlarged it as much as I could without causing serious pixelation.
- I cropped it to a perfect square (which was all that would fit on my computer screen).
- I added a Photoshop layer and drew an X over the entire image. (Normally, I'd put clear acetate over the source, and draw the X on the acetate with a Sharpie. In either case, I can easily lose the X when I've reached a point where I only want to see the unmarked image. I simply remove the acetate or hide the X layer in Photoshop.)
- I lightly toned a 17" x 14" sheet of white paper using brown conte crayon, paper towels, and a chamois.
- I needed to make a corresponding X on my paper. However, I wasn't using a square sheet because I intended to draw more of the torso than was visible onscreen after enlarging the image. So, I put light dots at four corners of an imaginary square starting 1/2 an inch down and in from the top of the page.
- I pinched a thin edge on a kneaded eraser, and used it to lightly draw an X connecting the four corner dots. (Sometimes I draw the X lightly with the medium I'm using; but, lines from charcoal, conte, and other drawing media – however light – are hard to completely erase. This is especially true of a hard pastel crayon like conte. But, if the X is already an erased line, it eventually disappears completely into the drawing.)
When working from 2-D sources, I often use an X as an abbreviated grid to determine the general placement and relationship of the features without inhibiting the impulse to draw in a more free-hand fashion – or committing myself to slavishly copying the source. In lieu of a more complex grid, I use mirrors to check accuracy and perspective (gallery image 3). By simultaneously imposing distance and reversing the image, a mirror disrupts the context of a work causing the mind to suddenly see mistakes not previously apparent.
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