This was an interesting exercise in learning when to step away. I have ruined many a drawing by getting overly fussy and deciding that some extra detail needed to be included or some element that I had labored over really needed to be erased and re-done.
This is a pencil drawing based on a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, from the catalog of a retrospective of his work that I was very fortunate to be able to see in San Francisco a few years ago. There's a lot more going on in the original photo than I included here and the angle of the figure's head is totally wrong but, after stepping back from it, I decided that it had gone far enough and that I needed to put down my pencil before things started to go downhill. I'm still not sure if this was the right decision, but at this point I think I'm ready to declare it "as good as it's going to get" and move on to the next one.
