Asia Argento as Yelena
(xXx [2002])

Well, I took another stab at drawing Asia and met with a little more success (the shading on the hair looks good, if I do say so myself.) I went with a different picture to get away from the formal movie premier photo op IMDb usually has up. This image from IMDb really appealed to me despite my hatred for the movie it came from. While it’s clearly an improvement over my last render of Asia, this one ultimately suffered the same fate: discouragement, then abandonment (btw, no, I didn’t learn my lesson. No warm up sketches.) I became too critical of the fact her hands don’t quite look right, her shoulders don’t quite look right, her head isn’t positioned right, the pose doesn’t look natural, the tone was wrong in my drawing, and so I gave up (again.)

The real disappointment, though, was that my source photo had a lot of details (such as the patterns and translucency on the robe) that I thought looked great, but I didn’t even try to transfer them to my drawing. Instead, I simplified and simplified, mistakenly thinking it would make drawing her easier and it would come out better. Looking back over the collection of drawings I’ve uploaded and commented on, the two images of Asia are the most disappointing. I’ve screwed up a lot of drawings, and anyone who has taken the time to read my comments know I’m not afraid to criticize my own work. I’ve made some more drastic mistakes in my drawings, and I’ve hit the same errors over and over again, but at least I tried something new. At least they had ambition. Here, though, these two images represent something I could have done, but gave up on.

That’s more devastating and far more disappointing than crashing and burning because I aimed too high.

It’s not a total loss, though. Before when I tried drawing unique facial features I would unintentionally age the subject. Just the act of drawing from real life gave me more experience observing the finer details in the hands, in flesh tones, and shadows ... letting me see the subject more clearly. Still, the fact I just gave up will always haunt me.

Five Years Later: Asia Argento (xXx), Take Two