Gallery of Faces

With the end of another semester I’ve acquired more fancy art to share. This time I had the joy of focusing in and learning to draw the human head with better precision through learned focus. While I will always have room to grow I think this past semester I learned quite a bit.

Like every drawing class, you start out with exercises and warm up sketching. It was fun to start out first by drawing skulls. By drawing the bones I was able to better understand the shape of the face. Some of my favorite lessons about the face is how the eyes are set back into the face, not lit up and glowing like people often draw. We had a fun day drawing class mates for 5 to 10 minute intervals. Sometimes the faces were horrid and didn’t look anything like the poor person. These were my favorite because you could see what people were focusing in on but maybe got carried away with.

It was hard to focus on line quality while also trying to get in what seemed like important details. You can see by my darker lines where I would focus. Eyes, lips, ears, and specific hair or head decorations like hats or earrings. I noticed that even after almost 2 months I couldn’t just pop out amazing heads during warm up. While I would sometimes hit the mark other times it seemed I hadn’t quite grasped my best method to blocking in the face with accurate dimensions.

We would study by focusing in on different things about drawing like dimension, values, angles, different lighting directions, color, warm and cool lighting, and the relation between foreground and background. Each lesson built from the last and soon enough I had reached a point where I could focus on the details without having the basics hold me back. You may notice while most studies were done with dark on light we had one assignment where we practiced light on dark. This may sound easy but you have to completely change the way you focus and draw in your shapes and values. As a special treat I drew myself for some of the assignments. I tried to be unforgiving and draw what I really saw, which was the point to this class. Draw what we see not what would flatter the person. You do that once you can perfect the first part.

I couldn’t always find someone to post for my homework assignments so I found and used images from online. I’ve provided the image I used so as to give credit to those amazing photographers and the beautiful people they photographed. Also you can test my skill by comparing the two if you’d like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, so I didn’t turn into a head drawing guru but I know I wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I have this far without practice. I will say I’d never taken the chance until this course to really try and study skin tones. While I have a lot of obvious work ahead of me I like to think I’m getting somewhere.

Thanks for reading and as always like, comment, share, and subscribe if you enjoy what I’ve posted here today. I’d love to hear what you think.

emsilay4