Conte. What can I say about Conte? I can’t say I particularly enjoy it. I can appreciate the challenge, because its basically like someone took the crappy parts of using graphite and the crappy parts of using charcoal, and mixed them together into an all new demon-medium. To be fair, I’ve never used it before, so maybe I just need to get used to it, but its so challenging to build up the value, and the facts that it smudges, but you can’t remove the smudges, makes for a rather annoying experience.
This drawing wasn’t necessarily the most difficult in drawing the objects, although I know a couple things are off in terms of wobbly lines and a bit of perspective, but if I’m being honest, I had little patience, and I wanted to finish using Conte as soon as possible. I started with the darkest values I could create and moved from there, beginning with all of the fabric and then moving on to the objects’ values. I think my favorite ended up being the lotion tube plus the Rubix Cube. I think they turned out well in value and proportion. I definitely struggled with leaving open white space again. Especially in the bowl at the bottom right. The difficulty is that if I get any amount of conte on a white spot, its permanently non-white, and there is nothing to do to remedy that issue.
During the critique I noticed a lot of different approaches to using the medium. Some people included white Conte, and others attempted to smudge and blend it. I opted out of using white specifically because I didn’t’t want to allow myself to use it as a crutch. Also I prefer its appearance on toned paper. I may be getting the hang of Conte in a sense, but it will never be my favorite.
