Tonight I was inspired by another artist to do some small portrait studies in ink. The main goal was to use the unforgiving nature of ink to force myself to think about each line and make it count.
I follow the blog of Teresa Oaxaca, she calls it a the Drawing & Painting Journal. She is a very eccentric artist and her artwork is beautiful as well as technically well done. Some of her drawings remind me of Sargent and her paintings are a torrent of action and figure. Her blog is definitely worth checking out.
One of her latest posts featured some of her etching for sale and I was marveling how well she described a portrait in so few lines and managed to indicate the roundness of the form. I figured that with practice I could learn to do the same.
I tended to get too detailed with these portraits and next time I do them I should focus on describing the form with as less lines as possible. A few of the portrait studies turned out really well, but I was amazed that these 7 and a half drawings took me an hour and a half. Regardless they were a lot of fun, which is something I haven’t being saying often so maybe I should pick up the pen more often…
