Portraits, Days 2 and 3

The portrait we did on Day 2 was all about capturing facial proportions. The teacher did the familiar breakdown of a face into a circle over an oval, and then showed measurements for where the eyes would fall, how far it should be from the eyes to the chin, where the nose and lips fall inside that, etc.

I have never done very well by working with these kinds of measurements. When I draw the head of my subject first, I inevitably end up making the features either way too large or way too small, which seems to make the shape of the face look like an unrelated balloon, either over-inflated or slightly deflated, surrounding the features. Also, I maintain that those measurements work a lot better for a typical Anglo-Saxon face than they do for others, so while they are limitedly useful, they are not infallible. Finally, they only work if your model is looking at you dead on. If their head is on a slant, turned slightly away, tilted up or down, and so on, it's a much trickier proposition.

I watched a contour drawing demo once in which the artist drew the eyes first, and when I tried that myself I discovered that if you can get the eyes right—the correct distance away from each other, the right shapes in proportion to one another—it becomes much easier to do the rest. You can extrapolate where the nose and mouth should fall but, most importantly, you can see by simply looking how far away the sides of the face should be from the various features, bit by bit, by running your eye along the outline and following with your hand. I still have trouble sometimes with the head above the eyes, especially with the height of it, but it's nothing like as bad as drawing the head first, so this is the method I have followed.

My biggest failing is to get the nose too far away from the eyes, which messes up all the other proportions (witness my slightly horse-faced drawing of my friend Susan, left, who does have a long thin face but not to this extent!). That nose was about half again as long as it should have been, and if it had been right, the rest of the portrait would have worked, because I definitely caught the likeness. So even though I don't plan to convert to drawing faces the way the teacher advocated, I do intend to make use of the measurements from the eyes to the nose, the nose to the mouth, and the mouth to the chin. Those will be helpful!

Here is Tonya, our subject for the day. The object she was observing with those wide-open eyes was a big plate of salad, but I didn't have either the room on the page or the time to devote to drawing that, so Tonya will remain amazed by whatever the viewer decides for her.

This got a little overworked on my mixed media paper; but I hate to convert to watercolor paper for this, because I want these all to be together in a sketchbook. Perhaps I will go buy a watercolor sketchbook of the proper size to solve that problem.

Today's effort was about mapping light and shadow, about observing the face for lightest lights and darkest darks and making a "map" of those places. Since light and shadow were supposed to be the focus, I gave up my usual drawing tool (Uniball pen) and did this one in light pencil that could be obscured or erased after.

Since I work in watercolor, I'm used to saving out the whites from the bare paper, so this was fairly easy for me. Less easy was capturing the model's likeness, whose head was chin up and on a slant. I ended up starting by drawing her nose, which was the center, and working outward from there. I am not sure that Haley would recognize herself in this picture, so while I am happy with the picture, I'm not as happy with the portrait. I again had some issues with my paints, but when I washed my palette to get the inevitable accumulation of grit out of it (I leave my paints sitting open too much), that helped. I enjoyed getting the colors and shadows just right on this one, and working with a fairly limited palette to achieve it. And the hair was the most fun ever. Here is Haley.

Portraits are tough, but they are also a whole lot of fun. I'm glad I took up this challenge. My next requirement will be to get something else done besides the daily portrait!