After yesterday’s issues with painting the portrait I decided to start some practice session to get better at it.
I have been focusing on doing portraits at the life drawing sessions on Saturdays but I don’t think once a week is enough, I need to practice more. I finally found some good images to work from online, I just did a google search for portrait reference and followed a bunch of random links, too many random places to post here.
I don’t really have a habitual process that I use for portrait drawing so I’m establishing that now. I may try a few different things like starting with paint rather than graphite.
For today I’m following a more structural approach by focusing on building the head with form and space in mind. Each curve of the head becomes a series of planes that distinctly indicate where values are changing due to the form turning away from the light, or toward it.
So far the drawing is going well on this, but I was hoping to finish painting the whole portrait in an hour. I completely overestimated the time it takes to do a good portrait though.
Here is a compare of the drawing to the reference. Overall I got the head shape fairly accurate, along with the nose and lips but I’m way off on the eyes. I’m going to have to redraw the eyes on the next session before I start painting.
