Jesseca Trainham

I met Jesseca Trainham during the Silver Age. We were both into Dario Argento and had registered as members of the Dark Discussions cinema forums. Her nom-de-post was Stay Hungry and she had some amazing, wild critiques to offer on Suspiria and Argento's Phantom of the Opera.

The single happiest time in my life was the week I spent in rural New York with Jesseca. I arrived with an ear that refused to op from the flight, a knee scraped from a spill the day before, and a finger recovering from infection. It didn't matter, because I was in a state of grace. She met me at the airport looking like a folk-rock star wearing a smile as wide as her outstretched arms.

I've never known a soul more compassionate than Jesseca, more insightful, or as voracious with curiosity. She is a seeker of knowledge who goes right to the source, never complacent to be a blind complacent follower of teachings diluted and warped by orthodoxy. Her path is a wandering one that embodies that most essential but rarely enacted endeavor of human existence: she questions. 'Quest,' after all is, the root of 'question'.

Jesseca has been many things for me including my confidant, and we have seen each other through any number of personal crises. I'm damn lucky to have her in my life.

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This drawing has been the most challenging that I've completed so far, and it taught me at least one valuable lesson and probably more. It was done on a Strathmore drawing tablet, medium surface, 8x10 inches, using my usual 0.3 mm mechanical pencil. The page has a nice cream tinge to it compared the the bleached white of some papers, though the medium surface did not afford me the smoother shading I'm capable of.

There is a quality to her expression that I didn't manage to capture entirely from the photograph, and I've not been able to pin down just where I went astray. You can see her intelligence, her humor, and her warmth, those come through, but there's also a joy that almost looks surprised radiating from her smile, the spark in her eyes. I think it's a matter of the job I did in shading her skin, but I'm not certain. I thought that was going to be the easiest element but it surprised me in being the most difficult. You see, I had to do some juggling with the tones that altered them for the blank page. In a photograph, you have skin tones that stand apart from a fully active background that are often darker than the subject. If you are only drawing the subject, then you have to make your skin tones darker than they are in the photograph to bring them to life against a blank white field. Her skin in the drawing is now darker then the reds in the plaid of her hat, where in the photograph they are significantly darker than her skin. You cannot stay a hundred percent true to the source, you have to make choices.

This is where the invaluable lesson came in. last Monday night I thought I was done with the drawing (that last session was much shorter than expected, only two hours) thus I made a scan. That done I compared the scan to the photograph on my computer screen and found I had done too simplistic a job rendering the tones of her face and throat. I then spent the next four hours repeating a cycle of correcting, scanning, and comparing. Now...scanning for details and comparisons to the source can be a useful tool just as spraying a model or sculpt with primer can reveal flaws in your work that need rectifying, but it can also be a trap. The more I corrected (I scanned her about eight time that night) the unhappier I became with the drawing. After awhile it was becoming muddy in my eyes the way overworked colors in a painting become muddy. Here's the thing: I was trying to get a scan that looked right. My estimation of work needed was based not on the drawing as it lay on the page but based on what the scanner saw and relayed to my screen. The scan is not the drawing. If the lesson needs stating plainly, here it is – let the drawing itself, and only the drawing, dictate what it requires. I had to force myself to stop, but after two or three days I was really happy with the results.

As I said, I had expected different aspects of this to be the more difficult than actually transpired. One thing that pleases me no end is that I can magnify the image many times over and the fine details still look good. The earrings I had to leave at 'good enough” rather than perfect, but that's a lesson I've already learned (learning is one thing, becoming comfortable with it another). The links of the necklace are almost impressionistic rather than detailed, but thy look right all the same. The butterfly pendant was surprisingly quick to manifest, and reasonably accurate. I like how her hair came about. That wonderful plaid hat of hers, now, that took forever! I had to map it out panel by panel, many times erasing entirely what I had done and starting over. This kind of detail is where it helps to have a large, detailed image on your computer to check your work by. Not only can you zoom in, the image onscreen is more luminous than a printed photographed.  The work paid off as the final result is the kind of tactile quality I strive for in every drawing.  Looking at it, I can feel how warn, thick, and fuzzy the real thing must be.  Her skin is soft and smooth, the glasses frames are study and clean, her hair full-bodied.

I'm often uncertain  where to lay the border of  the subject, under the throat.  I had intended to establish the necklace itself as the lower border for this image, but once I began shading her throat the drawing insisted that I continue toward her shoulder.  That was the  right call to make.