Portrait Practice at Work

I worked on these portraits over a period of time, roughly starting around the time of the portrait workshop.

The first drawing I did on this page is the larger one of the Lebanese woman, on the left. (I took her photo in maybe 1990, and always liked the image, even though the photo is rather flat. She has beautiful henna designs on her hands, which of course I didn't draw.)

For this drawing, I was interested in starting from a single detail and working out from there, kind of like mapping your neighborhood, then working outward to map your city, then your state (or 'province' for us Canadians), then finally your country. (Because no matter what they tell you, it IS your country!) This is opposite to my usual working method of mapping out the country with all the provincial/municipal divisions, then "colouring them in." It's not that I dislike that method, but I was intrigued by this method, and wanted to give it a shot. I know that people work this way (Richard Schmidt for one), and just wanted to give it a shot myself.

It seems to me that it is slightly more demanding, as all of your tiny measurements have resonance in the larger structure, whereas, if you start large and work down to the smaller details, the worst you can do is misplace an eye (as opposed to, for example, distorting her cheek, like I did).

Another effect that I tried was to make the features darker and clearer and leave the rest slightly more hazy. Unfortunately, I didn't think of doing this until well into the drawing, so I kind of attempted to retroactively fit the effect into the drawing, with limited success.

I was pleased with the feel of the flesh, and the rendering of the features in general. (The eye is slightly misplaced, the mouth was too large, though I may have fixed that...and the hands are way too large. And the cheek too far out.) Despite its faults, though, I actually like the effect. I like the shapes of the fingers (even if they're a little large), and I'm pleased with the contour of the cheek. The reason I didn't do a more finished piece is that the hand was too far gone, and I just plain didn't feel like working on her head covering.

Next up was the portrait of the woman on the right, drawn from a photo of a portrait bust in the Louvre.