Saturday, January 9, 2010

The Christmas Hat


A favorite hobby of mine is collecting old photographs and postcards of which I have a fairly large collection. It's so fun to see how people dressed so many years ago. Some of my old photographs are in the form of what is called "cabinet cards" which were popular betwee the early 1880's and and 1920's. I ran across one in my collection of a strikingly beatiuful woman in a vintage hat that I felt compelled to attempt to draw. Since I'm continuing to learn to keep values consistent I found the old black and white image an excellent reference photo as well as an interesting subject. I decided to do it in graphite and colored pencil and was rather disappointed in the hat. The reference had little detail and my efforts to add what wasn't there caused me to fall into that old amateur trap. I was able to get some nice shadows with the chair and the coat although it was rather tricky with so much dark in the reference photo. It was great fun over Christmas to work on this and I decided to call it the Chistmas hat using reds and greens.