On Portraiture

Just a few quick things this week. I've had a bear of an assignment in my Color & Design class - two days straight of working bent over the drawing board with a tiny brush for 6-8 hours at a go. I am determined to get it right, but WOW has it been exhausting. Aside from all that though (the end result will be posted next week!) we were doing our portraiture module in intermediate figure drawing, which gave me the opportunity to do a nice portrait, something that doesn't come up all the time.

I got out the good charcoal paper for the assignment before I ever found my reference. There's something about portraiture that's just... *special*. It's an honor to put a person's likeness to paper. I don't get into all the stuff about "transferring the soul of the subject" or anything - I just want a good likeness, and a nice work of art. At the same time, it is intensely personal. I've been drawing portraits a long time. Over 15 years ago I started seriously trying to capture realism and likeness and personality in my drawings of faces, and I copied lots and lots of photos. But there's a big difference between copying a photo and creating a piece of art from the act of doing so.

You can't just draw an object when you're doing a portrait. I mean, every little thing an artist draws or paints is, essentially, breaking down the subject into shapes and lines and values and colors. It's very scientific and very impersonal. That's why our figure drawings aren't titillating unless we mean them to be. The figure is just another collection of lines and shapes and values. There's no difference between a breast and a coffee mug. And especially working academically, there's no deeper feeling involved outside of wanting it to look right, and the thrill of getting it to look right, whatever it is.

Again, I'm speaking only for myself. I'm sure other more passionate and expressive artists might disagree with me. But expressive art is a whole different subject.

But portraiture. Portraiture *has* to be personal. A model goes up on a platform, disrobes, and says "Draw this!" That's what they're there for. But a PORTRAIT. How often do you just go up to someone and touch their face? It's an incredibly intimate gesture. So much of creating art is touching, though transferred from the eye to the hand. So when approaching a portrait, I always come in humbled. Humbled that I would be allowed this intimacy and trust. It doesn't matter if the subject is some celebrity in a press photo or someone's photographs of their family or from life. A portrait is something special.

This week, I was looking for references for my Color & Design project when a photo of Rachel Weisz jumped out at me for the portrait assignment. It was very simple, very sedate, a profile with a lot of black and white contrast. This feather in her hat had a lovely way of curving down to match up with the curve of her jawline. I said, that's the one, that's the ref for this week's portrait. So I spent quite a few hours with Rachel, muttering apologies about how big I'd often mistakenly draw her nose, before finally ending up with a lovely portrait.


It was just SO PLEASANT to spend time doing such a thing this week. I have to draw arms and torsos next. Not quite so special.

While on the subject of portraiture, a couple months ago I was asked to do a caricature of the pastor of my mom's church, First Presbyterian Church of Clarks Summit (shameless plug since I'm not a member, but really, it's a great place up there!) It was for a big celebration event for some of major milestones, and the caricature was to be one of the presented gifts. Oh boy. Well, I've never done a caricature. I've always thought it's a cool thing, especially when you see folks set up on sidewalks and such doing them in 10 minutes for $20 or whatever. But I also think it's related to that gift cartoonists have, of being able to capture expression and likeness in a minimum amount of lines. I don't have that gift of efficiency, unfortunately. I had to draw a portrait, then work backwards to simplicity.

I didn't, of course, start with a portrait like the one above. Heaven's no - I would have presented that instead of the caricature if I did! I did do several quick sketches though, like any I would do, trying to learn the facial features and so forth and add them to the personality I'm familiar with. Then came the choices - what to accentuate? What to minimize? How to make the design work around it? I was very glad to be taking a design course right now, as I think it helped I had some of those ideas in mind. Anyway, I put everything together and drew it in pen and marker (terrifying unerasable media!) on layout bond paper, with a bit of graphite for shading. I crossed my fingers and handed it over, hoping it would be well-received.

Sadly, I only have one kind of shoddy picture of it, since I forgot to take one apparently before I framed it and handed it over.



I was really, really surprised by how many congregation members came up to me after the event and told me how well it captured their pastor. I was also really, really relieved! Because it wasn't just a picture. Even though it was a caricature, it was still a portrait, and I was still humbled and honored to draw it.

Portraits are just special like that.

So Much!

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

Ah, the semester is in full swing, and it's amazing how intense and time-consuming schoolwork can be. Both classes are going well though. I'm learning tons in Color & Design and getting a lot of good practice in Intermediate Figure Drawing. Both classes are stretching me quite a bit, which is a good thing. Color & Design is like constant flashes of insight and wonder. I've taken some color theory in the past, but nothing like this. There is not enough time to experiment and practice the way I want to.

Look, I made a color wheel!


The trick is, that whole wheel was mixed from just six different tubes of paint (the swatches with dots over them). Now we all know that yellow and blue make green, but it's very different to gradually mix blue into yellow and "discover" greens, one at a time. It's almost like learning words, seeing how letters fit together to create a pattern that means something. Except it's colors fitting together to create a recognizable hue. And then you add to that black and white and mixing complements, etc. and it's all really very exciting.

Plus you get to do nice things like this monochromatic portrait. I used the same reference a while back in this blog for some painting, but I sure like it better like this, in lovely blue-violets and lilac:


So next up we'll be combining hues and values and so forth to do a portrait design, and I'm very excited about it. I've never had such a handle on color before - it's totally not the same as just matching what you see. There's so much more. It's hard to put into words.

And now to flood you all with tons of naked people!


The week before last we started doing full-value drawings like the one above, and I felt very confident about it. We also did this value portrait, which was great for forcing oneself to get a lot of charcoal on the page (and also great fun for using the kneaded erasure to lift it out again):


I think it was the week before that we copied a photo of this statue, too, which was also very good practice at shading and values, though the torso nearly drove me crazy:



So getting high marks on those, I was feeling pretty confident in my drawing skills and my charcoal technique. I also took photos as I went along for one of the exercises, so I have this nice step-by-step to share with you!

Step 1:

This is the hardest part, doing the actual drawing, putting a figure on a blank page. You can see a lot of my measurements and plumb lines here, and some corrections. I work in vine for this stage so I can brush it off easily, and try to use as many straight lines as possible.

Step 2:

Here I've outlined the drawing in charcoal pencil, and put in the basic shadow-shapes.

Step 3:

I then use a tissue to smear the charcoal all over the paper. Once everything is a gray mess, I pick out the highlights again with a kneaded erasure.

Step 4:

Here we go back in with the charcoal and work on the shadows. This step takes a very, very long time, as I go over everything, adding darks and smoothing them into midtones, then picking out the highlights again.

And here is the finished drawing:


Now that I have a handle on that technique, which seems to work every time (at least that's what the grades show!) I've started to experiment more with gesture and texture and more expressiveness. I hope it won't end up a detriment, as I haven't gotten grades back yet this week! But here are two more, with, I hope, a little added "oomph":


That second one, I'm really proud of. It seems to me to be more than just a figure drawing exercise, that it captures some moment or some emotion. Not bad for a drawing off a photo of a model!

So there's the past few weeks, and hopefully I won't let so much time pass before the next post here! There's some pretty exciting fun stuff ahead, so I'll try to keep track of it and post when I can!