Master study of Ewdin A. Abbey

For our History of American Illustration class we had to take an image from an artist in our book we had covered thus far and do a "Master study" of the work. For those of you who do not know what this is it means you take a work by an artist and try to mimic there art. This does not mean copy there work in your still it means even trying to mimic their stock and lie quality thus learning and improving by example. It trains your eye really well so they frequently give us these and photorealisum studies to do. We also had to write a paper about why we chose them and what we learned you know the normal things teachers want to hear. I chose this image by Edwin Austin Abbey because he is an awesome artist and the image really stood out to me in the book. After many failed attempts at reproducing this image ( I tried colored pencils, charcoal etc. ) I desided on a wim to make the darkest parts in ink and then add mid gray tones similar to how you go about a 3 value atmopheric perspective drawing/sketch. So here is the image from the book (which might i add was really small and i had to enlarge it to make my drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 bristol board) the ink study and the final more or less 3 value peice...enjoy

Medium: Graphite on 8 1/2 x 11 bristol board
Class: InHistory of American Illustration
Time: Aprox 3-5 hrs
Completed: Oct '05

All artwork © 2005 Alicia Ravenshaw (me)