Life Drawing Class: Portraiture and Final

Posted by C.Locke / at 9:11 AM / /

Even though I'm no longer in life drawing seeing as the class ended in May, I have made note I am quite a few months behind on my blogging and am going to be catching up for a while. After gestures and drawing the figure, my class moved onto portraiture. I was not at all very good at drawing face accurately, but after I learned how to do this, I was amazed at what I could do.

We would still start with marking where things were and drawing a triangle to get a feel where the forehead and chin were. Then we would carve out the light from the charcoal, then gradually move onto detail. First starting with a chamois then moving up to finer tools such as an eraser. So here are some of the portraits I did (keep in mind some of them are unfinished since the models we had in class were only there for a few periods).


For my final, we had to do a self portrait, mine doesn't look like an exact representation of me for those that know me. Yet I did it in 7 hours and spent more time brainstorming about the piece. I chose a blue toned paper to bring this feeling of melancholy, and I wanted to focus on this one feeling because that was all I was thinking about. I was somewhat depressed during this time. I got a hold of a broken mirror (thanks to my dad) and cropped it so the cracks would be at the edge and cause this sort of tension and uncomfortableness, also that the cracks, spider web like are creeping into the picture. It represented this chaos and distortion, brokenness and sadness. I had one light source and the things in the background I blurred out because they didn't matter, at the time I didn't care about anything else. We were supposed to spend about 20 hours on it, but my teacher loved that I put thought into almost every little detail. Yay for a good semester of life drawing, one of the best classes I've ever taken :)