So sorry..

I'm sorry for falling so far behind in these blog posts. I'll try and make up for it in the coming weeks.

My last post included one of three portraits that we did in class (portrait of Evan T.). I've posted the other two below (Evan B. and Megan).

It was quite the experience to do portrait drawings again considering the only one I'd done before was my self-portrait in Life Drawing 1. While drawing someone else wasn't as difficult as drawing myself, it was still far from easy. Outside of class, I rented a couple videos of Robert Hale's artistic anatomy lectures (those that focused on the head), and picked up a number of pointers that I felt were important to remember. For example, using the width of the eye as a way to approximate proportion, and picturing the planar structure of the skull as a ball (representing the cranium) with a soda can coming out of it (the jaw).

I was much more comfortable drawing my last portrait than I was the first, and felt like I had a better understanding of the form. With that being said, my first drawing is oddly the most successful of the three (in terms of similarity to the model, anyway). As I mentioned during the critique, I find that one of the biggest challenges I face is that my eyes continually lie to me about what's in front of me. I could draw a line on my paper and swear that it was where it was supposed to be, but later realize that it was way too straight. I think that I need to work on exaggerating the form more in order to get better results. My final portrait of Megan (pictured) looks much better than what I had before doing a number of corrections (I didn't post that version.. for her sake). As for Evan B.'s portrait.. I just don't know about that one. The lines have the most movement of the three drawings, but that's all I have to say about that. In the critique, a comment was also made about the fact that my portraits look like they were drawn by three different people. This may suggest that I'm still searching for a style of drawing that works for me, and I think I will be able to make big improvements once I do develop that style.


Evan T.


Megan