Starting portraiture

Drawing people is a big challenge - and for me, drawing faces is more of a challenge than life drawing ... perhaps because I've done less of it. I'm not at all fond of looking at faces and turning them into pictures. This might have its roots in school days, hearing that when explorers made contact with natives and took photographs, the people thought the cameras were stealing their souls. And if a camera can do it, so can a drawing...

However here I am, in the "starting portraiture" class at City Lit, 10 weeks of drawing faces. After the first class, I'm getting a feeling for how much I need to learn - and a glimmering of where I'm going wrong at the moment. 

In groups of three, we talked about what we knew in terms of methods. My group decided to start by putting the head "inside a cube". (Other groups were drawing the planes of the face, starting with the eyes, and basing their drawings on skull anatomy ... it made for interesting viewing when the first pix were taped up around the room.) I started out with a cube the wrong shape, not flat enough on top, as you can see from the rubbing out -

The rather mysterious hand-out was explained by the tutor and was the basis of several 5-minute poses -

Starting with an oval for the head, draw a line around the centre and another to cross it - the eyes will go on that line, and you'll use it for placing the ear too. The eyes are generally half way between the chin and top of the head. Note that the oval needs "some jaw" adding.

And so we set to work - two poses before the break -

with the models moving their heads to different positions, so that the lines on our ovals would be in different positions. Yes, these are all supposed to be the same face -

Finally, a demo of using rubbed-in charcoal as the basis and adding dark line and taking out light areas ... then do another drawing ... and only 15 minutes for it. It's about twice the size of the heads on the previous sheet. I'm longing to change the neck and ear and nose and.....

Another chance to practice next week. Will it ever look recognisably like the model?