In my tutorial my tutor fedback how the shadow at the bottom of the door in my second assignment piece appeared to be competing with the gown, how when she looked at the image she was drawn to both the gown and the bottom of the door at the same time, I could sort of see what she meant but agreed to look at trying to reduce the shadow back. I knew that I had struggled with the shadow anyway, again working from a photograph I had been trying to copy exactly what was in the photograph and as we had discussed I am not obliged to do this! I also discussed how whilst drawing when I was struggling I had always sought to address any problems by adding something more, layering on more oil pastel or mixing in more linseed but had not thought about trying to reduce back or remove/erase some of the medium which is what she suggested here.
I struggled with this at first. I initially tried with more linseed to try and blend and soften the pastel in some way but this just seemed to make the shadow even darker so I then tried to remove a layer of the pastel with some turps which seemed to remove too much. This really raised my anxiety; I was convinced I had now ruined the image and it would not be salvable. I decided to leave it and return to it the next day. A problem I had was that the drying process was quite slow, whilst I am often impatient, in this exercise I had no choice and just had to accept and wait. When I came back to it again, I started adding a little more oil pastel and this seemed to help. I used lighter tones to reduce the shadow back, as the linseed oil was still wet the additional pastel tended to blend anyway but as I continued it started to look a very different texture to the rest of the door so was then changing the image totally. The more I worked the more the bottom of the door seemed to bend, the blending seemed to have altered the perspective but as it was still wet I was unable to do any more so left it again for another day.
Eventually I felt I got to a stage where the shadow remained, but is clearly on the door in the background and enabled the gown to lift from the door, I am quite pleased that I persevered in the end as I did initially struggle to see what had to be done.
See re-worked piece below.
Deborah McAulay 