Draw With Me

Sketchbook Skool has a couple of weekly features that are kind of fun. One of them is called "Draw Tip Tuesdays," with Koosje Koone, which addresses some issue about which sketchers have expressed difficulties and offers solutions. The other, which I haven't tuned into as much, is called "Draw With Me," and is run by Koosje's co-founder, Danny Gregory, who simply picks a subject to draw and asks everyone else to draw along. It may be literally drawing the same thing he does, or it may be an instruction such as to draw what you can see out your window (his being much more glamorous and intricate than mine, since he lives in New York City!).

This past week, Danny decided to put SBS Dean of Students Morgan Green front and center: He excerpted five or six "screen grabs" from her weekly SBS Bulletin, and we all made three- to five-minute drawings of her based on those. Needless to say, with that amount of time they weren't the most flattering drawings ever made! Danny himself was working on his iPad, this being his new passion, and some students followed suit, while the rest of us stuck with pencil, pen, or whatnot.

Here are the four sketches I completed. We had a whole discussion, mid-sketch on #1, about teeth and how difficult they are to do, and Danny suggested that, rather than draw the individual teeth, it looked better just to draw a teeth-shaped block and maybe put in a little gumline detail, because when you draw all the teeth verbatim, they just look wrong. Despite having been successful in the past with some people's teeth, after doing one of these of Morgan I decided he was right, and confined myself to blocks from there on out!

I forgot to post these in the "Skoolyard" (the private site for SBS members) after I did them, and once I had, I thought to myself, Poor Morgan, you owe her a decent portrait. So I went to her latest Bulletin and kept hitting the pause button until I managed to snare a decent "in repose" face (with no teeth showing!), and drew and painted one.

Her hair is dyed kind of a rust brown on one side and a white with lavender highlights on the other. Because I put it all in with pen first, it was hard to convey the lightness of the one side, although I did add some white. I hope this portrait makes up for the others!

"Morgan DWM" and
"Morgan SBS Green"

In the sketchbook...
Uniball pen, Paul Jackson Watercolors