I decided to try my hand at a slightly more refined drawing than the quick and rough sketches that I usually do, by making a copy (or rather,
trying to make a copy!) of an original by the 19th century French academic artist William Bouguereau (1825 - 1905). My drawing actually looks a bit better than the digital photo of it here, which somehow exaggerated tones and lines, and making the drawing look rougher than it is. But it is still pretty crude compared to Bouguereau's highly refined original, which can be seen
here.
In short, I got almost everything wrong. For one thing, I failed to capture a likeness in the face, although I can perhaps forgive myself for that, because the head in my drawing is only 4 cm high, and it can be difficult to work on so small a scale. But I can see plenty of other problems here as well, some of which I only noticed now, and some of which I did notice while drawing but couldn't work out how to solve, or that I could solve but not without introducing new problems in the process. I do think the whole exercise was a very valuable learning experience though. As Ed Wood said of his awful movies, my next one will be better. Here is my attempt; it is about 25cm x 18cm, in pencil on cheap computer printer paper (which was of course mistake number one):

There is a perception amongst many contemporary art critics that Bouguereau and his academic colleagues were painters of kitsch for the upper middle classes, purveyors of mere polite pretty pictures. To those who hold to such views, I would suggest trying to copy some of his work, and then see whether there is anything at all "mere" about this level of technique and craftsmanship. I get the impression that much of the criticism against technically competent art is born from nothing more than simple jealousy, and that "kitsch" has become a word that means nothing more sophisticated than "highly skilled art that I somehow still don't like, and definitely couldn't produce myself."
It is of course true that Bouguereau painted for the rich, and that his paintings are mostly on the polite side. What else was he supposed to do? It took at least several weeks to complete a painting of this level of refinement, and such a painting then had to be sold for the equivalent of several weeks' worth of salary, or no artist would be able to make a living. Only the rich could afford to pay that kind of money for paintings, and hence it was inevitable that artists had to reach compromises between what they wanted to paint and what the market wanted. This is still true today.
Now had it been a mob of desperately poor peasants that complained about the bourgeois style of the academic painters, one might understand their vehemence. But the irony is that the people who accuse Bouguereau of being a mere propagandist for bourgeois values, are for the most part
themselves as blandly bourgeois as you'll find anywhere on the planet. I have yet to meet an art critic who doesn't live in upper middle class comfort. That these people have the nerve to complain about how the academic artists didn't "challenge the status quo" is pretty rich, considering that neither they nor the artists they frequently do promote do anything of the sort either. People who really do challenge society end up in poverty, prison or both. They don't live comfortable middle class lives or get paid millions for their work like, say, Damien Hirst. So if it is not a sin for a contemporary artist to produce whatever the rich (and their favourite art critics) want, in order to make a decent living from his or her work, I wonder why it should be considered to have been such a sin for 19th century artists, especially ones that went to the trouble of acquiring actual skill at something other than postmodernist pseudo-philosophy.
But enough ranting. I have to get back to the drawing board, so to speak...