portrait

A Warm-Up Portrait in Charcoal

| cathmary1030

It’s been some time since I’ve posted to this blog, but I’ve been doing a fair amount of sketching by copying from illustrations in childhood favorite books, and from some of the example drawings in art instruction books by Barrington Barber. Something best kept in a sketchbook and not posted to social media.

Of course, like every other beginning artist who does some copying, I eventually got bored! So, now I’m back to charcoal (from graphite) and starting to work on more portraits. With the portrait below, I used charcoal pencils, willow sticks, compressed sticks, and white “charcoal”. I’m about to start taking the learn-at-your-own-pace online course Charcoal Like Mad taught by Kara Bullock.

That ugly outline of a rectangle crossing the eyebrow and nose on the image is actually from the gummy tag identifying the color of this Canson Mi-Teintes paper (cinnamon). Ugh! But the paper has sat in my closet for about 2 years now, and the closet is the warmest room in the house in summer, coldest in winter. Time to use the stuff up.

In the meantime, this is just a warm-up to get back in the flow, and playing with charcoal.

My work is based on a Pixabay image by Anastasia Gepp.

More Head Practice

| cathmary1030

Here I was drawing free-hand against a traced copy of the reference photo (by Clarke Sanders on Unsplash). I merged the free-hand and the traced to see how far (or how close) I was to actual proportions. I added red pencil to the free-hand version so the lines would show up better in comparison.

While the face is relatively in the same proportions as the original, it’s substantially smaller all around. (Sigh.)

Drawing Heads – Reilly Method

| cathmary1030

I recently purchased Nathan Fowkes‘ How to Draw Portraits in Charcoal, and I also just signed up for his online course at Schoolism. It’s a 9-week course, and the idea in the first week is to get busy practicing drawing heads.

I had never heard of the Frank Reilly Method, but what I understand now is that it can assist you in thinking about the 3-dimensional form of the head, and how light and shadow can define the planes of the head.

An example is below — the light lands on the little girl’s face by her right eye in the photo, and in the Reilly drawing, the horizontal lines by the girl’s right eye indicate the planes of her face that would cause the light to land there, and not above or below.