I did this charcoal work as a part of the 4th weekly exercise of Let’s Face It 2024. It was taught by Jim Bentley. (He does a demo of this face on his Instagram account.) For the class he used Bristol paper — which I believe is fairly smooth — and also carbon powder applied with brushes, none of which I had. I did my charcoal piece with some willow charcoal, compressed charcoal sticks, and blending stumps. And on Strathmore Charcoal paper, tinted green.
The portrait comes from the week 43 exercise of Kara Bullock Art‘s Let’s Face It 2018 portrait art experience/class. While I am participating in the 2024 version, and (sort of) participated in the 2023 version, I bought the 2018 set of classes (52 weeks in all) last year. This was one that interested me.
I drew out most of the face last June with pencil, finished it earlier this week with willow charcoal and decided just to get it painted for the practice. (Even though I’m not crazy about parts of my drawing.)
Here’s the completed version, and below I have a set of photos of the in-between phases. (Too often we only see the final work people do, not the messy/ugly intermediate stages. 🙂 )
Here’s the in-progress stages. She looks more than a little sickly, and then I revised all the colors, not following the instructor at all.
Last year I signed up and paid for Let’s Face It 2023, a 52-week series of portrait lessons which you can either follow along with or use as inspiration for your own fully original art, but I never did a single exercise. This year I signed up for the 2024 version, and just completed the first week’s portrait. Week One was taught by Kara Bullock.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 