The Young Man as a Portrait Artist

Good news: I was accepted into Studio Escalier's 2011 alla prima portrait workshop!

In advance of that, I've been busy burning hours working on elements of portraiture: drawing ears, eyes, noses, and mouths, and learning the related anatomy. I know what the sclera is. I can identify the scaphoid fossa. I've learned about the infrapalpebral furrow. The helix, tragus, and their antagonists (the anti-helix and anti-tragus) are like dear, close friends by now. I'm just not sure what in heck the caruncula is. (And the girl at Starbuck's, who coincidentally was studying the anatomy of the eye, didn't know either, and left pretty quickly after I asked.)

(Well, OK...it's a chunk of meat in the 'lacrimal lake'....but what's it do?)

I've been copying some anatomical parts from Tony Ryder's wonderful book on figure drawing - perhaps the best figure drawing book I know of. Also have at hand Stephen Rogers Peck's Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist, which has decent anatomical information but rather weirdy, plasticky-looking paintings (I guess) of the anatomical parts (not to mention extremely old-fashioned photos). Also have some photos, a number of Titian's paintings that my work was kind enough to dontae colour copies of. I plan to draw from these as much as possible (I have Peck at work to draw over lunch hours), and then to work my way up to doing copies of the Titians. I want to start doing some portrait poster studies, and then move on to doing finished paintings of, say, a nose, an ear, a caruncularly-complete eye.