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!

Commitments

I signed up for a sketch a day in January and then didn't like the first day's prompt, so I decided to desert that in favor of Sktchy's "30 Faces in 30 Days" class. They have four or five teachers who are sharing their specific methods of drawing/painting portraits, and since I had such a good time trying to reproduce my friends' faces in 2019, I thought it would be a good fit.

The first day we did a familiar exercise—a blind contour. I find it's a lot harder to do a blind contour while looking at a photo than it is to do it when you're looking in the mirror, for example, but still doable. Here are my two efforts. With the first one, I started like the teacher did with the top of the head/forehead, and with the second I did what I have learned serves me better, which is to start with the eyes and then draw outward from there to get the proportions right.

Coincidental to the "let's draw portraits" initiative, Danny Gregory over at Sketchbook Skool decided to host a "Draw With Me" session today that consisted of trying to draw the Mona Lisa in 45 minutes. It was actually pretty fun. He did his on an iPad, but a lot of us did ours "manually." Aside from her body and arms being waaaay too small for her head, I was fairly pleased with my results.

I'll do today's Sktchy session later on, when I'm less tired of sitting!

The year in pictures: 2019

I followed some friends' examples and decided to post my "best of 2019." I branched out a bit this year, doing portraits of people, dogs, birds, and a few landscapes to throw in with the usual still life subjects, and doing 30x30 Direct for the first time. It was fun, and I want to expand even more. I also included my two "commercial" successes—my urban sketch of Bobby's Coffee Shop that made it to the cover of their menu, and my Breakfast with Two Valley Girls map. Thanks to everyone for their kind comments about what is always a work in progress.

Stay tuned...I signed up for both 30 sketches in 30 days and for Sktchy's 30 portraits in 30 days for the month of January! We'll see what sticks.

Good news

I just received an email from Nate at theydrawandtravel.com that my map of West Valley breakfast joints will appear in a book, a compilation of the 100 best maps submitted to the "Mapping Special Places" contest in which I entered it last month. He noted, "Of course, your map was a favorite of all the judges, me included!"

The book will be distributed to dozens of art directors worldwide. It's due out in early 2020.

The maps from the book will also be posted on the site of the sponsor of the contest, Stroly, where they will each have a QR code so viewers can find them online and actually use them if they happen to be in the area of the place you mapped.

I'm so excited!

Here's my map, again, called "Valley Girl Breakfast":

Some urban sketching

Last week I met a friend mid-afternoon at Hugo's for a late lunch/early dinner, and got there about 15 minutes early, so I did a sketch while waiting for her. The restaurant was uncharacteristically empty—it's a popular spot, but we seemed to have hit the lull between lunch leaving and dinner arriving. I really like the earth tones and green they used to decorate the restaurant—along with the lighting, it gives an intimate atmosphere.

Tuesday morning I woke up late and a little cranky.  I didn't have many groceries in the house and couldn't figure out what I would have for breakfast. Then I remembered my cousin telling me that the AMC in Woodland Hills does a special on Tuesdays—$6 for all movies for seniors (60 and over), all day! So I took myself to Bobby's Coffee Shop as a treat, where I did a sketch of the other end of the bar while I waited for my food, read my book, and enjoyed having someone else cook my (late) breakfast, and then I went to the movies. (I saw The Good Liar, which was great!) I'll have to remember this outing for future moody Tuesdays.

Bobby's was similarly uncrowded, between breakfast and lunch, so the only people in my sketch were this lone cell phone studier and one of the waitresses, who was renewing the supply of ketchup at the empty end of the bar.

Uniball pen and watercolor, in my Moleskine sketchbook.

Back to the prompts

I'm running behind on Doodlewash November, so in the interest of catching up, I decided to see if I could combine prompts. The two I chose were "Raccoon" and "Pomegranate," which seem unlikely as co-conspirators, but guess what? There is a video for absolutely every eventuality in life on YouTube, and one of a raccoon enjoying a snack of pomegranate seeds, sitting on pillows at a table and scooping them up from a pretty china plate is no exception! So I took a screen grab, and here we are:

Uniball pen, Signo white gel pen for whiskers
Watercolor
in the sketchbook...

#DoodlewashNovember2019

Challenge accepted

A couple of years ago, I took a class from Sketchbook Skool on map-making, taught by the talented Nate Padavick of theydrawandtravel.com. That year, teen summer reading club had a travel theme, and I came up with the idea that the teens could do a map for one of their summer projects—either a map of actual places they had been on vacay, OR a map based on a book they were reading. Anarda and I put together lists of books with road trips in them to facilitate ideas, and held a couple of workshop sessions, hoping for participation. Alas, the teens were not as fascinated with the idea as we were, and we only ended up getting about half a dozen to participate. We each had fun making a map, mine based on the book Anna and the French Kiss, by Stephanie Perkins, and Anarda's centered around Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

Two years later, I received an email saying that theydrawandtravel.com was having a contest, involving maps of "special places." And since for the past two years I had been contemplating an idea for a map, I decided, last week, that I was going to make and submit it.

Cousin Kirsten and I meet semi-regularly for breakfast out, usually on a day when she doesn't have to go to work until noon. For a long time we just went to one of our regular venues, but after a while we got bored and decided that since there were so many restaurants in the Valley, we should be explorers and try out a new one each time we met for breakfast. For about two years, we did just that. We did return to various places multiple times if we liked them a lot, but we tried to keep throwing new ones into the mix. We were somewhat restricted (this being Los Angeles) by morning traffic from going too far afield, so most of our choices ended up being in the west Valley, between my house (dead center) and hers (far west).

I sat down last Wednesday, looked up all the restaurants, and put them in order according to address, most of them along Ventura Boulevard. Then I made a small drawing of each restaurant's logo. Between Thursday and Sunday, I drew and redrew the map in pencil until I had everything just so, and then inked it onto good paper and watercolored it. And last night I submitted it to the contest.

Here is a .jpg of all the places we have sampled the eggs, potatoes, toast, waffles, coffee, etc. in the past couple of years:

And here is the link where you can find my entry, online at theydrawandtravel.com:

https://theydrawandtravel.com/illustrations/14692-breakfast-with-two-valley-girls

Kirsten is responsible for the title and the synopsis (inside the legend box), plus lots of helpful critique in-process. It's always beneficial to have someone who will let you bounce your ideas off of them!

Here are the details of the contest: https://www.theydrawandtravel.com/stroly-contest

I have no illusions that I will be one of the winners; but I'm so excited to be in the company of all these fantastic artists, and I admit that I do hope to be chosen for the top 100.

Also, check out Nate and Salli's other website, theydrawandcook.com. Similarly great art, and yummy recipes too.