Portrait Studies: February 15, 2011

Last night's class was all about portrait studies. It was quite a bit of fun and working strictly with the conte pencils on pastel paper was a good way to practice.

I'll go more into the detail of the structure later, but there are some basic steps that we used to just evaluate the head. We first drew a basic oval to represent the overall structure of the head. From there, drawing the center line to get the angle and then marking off tick-marks to determine the location of the eyes, base of the nose and then the mouth (The next post will contain more detailed look at this structure). From there, we determined where the large planes were for the face and which parts were in light and which parts were in shadow. Then it's a matter of massing the shapes based on our underlying structure.

The nice part about using the basic structure technique is that you think more about how the face fits into the basic structure, than trying to measure each minute angle. This leads to a more realistic and rounded portrait.

Not bad for some first attempts.