This is Julia from Sktchy. I was struck by how strange the proportions of her face looked in her Sktchy photo and I had fun capturing them in my portrait. I’m not suggesting she has a strangely proportioned face, merely that the camera did something weird when it took the photo, as cameras often do. I’m noticing that it’s these slightly “off” photos that attract my attention more and more – wondering if it’s a response to the endless stream of manufactured perfection we get fed by the media?
This is another page in my Screen Queens sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project. It’s a portrait of Andréa Martel from the French drama Call My Agent, played by Camille Cottin, who is unquestionably my lockdown screen queen.
This is Megan from Sktchy drawn with a couple of Bic 4 colour ballpoint pens. I love how these 4 colour pens force me to work with a limited palette but I realised after I’d drawn this how lazy I’ve become with some of my lines. I’m happy enough with the face here but the hair is very lazy – I didn’t bother to define it in the early stages of the drawing and so it just became a mass of colour below the ear. I’m going to try to take more care with my drawing in future and work on improving this.
This is Mic from Sktchy, drawn on my iPad Pro using the Procreate app,
This is another portrait for my “Screen Queens” sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project 2021. It’s a portrait of O-Ren Ishii from the Kill Bill movie trilogy, played by Lucy Liu.
This is Andrew from Sktchy and, of course, I’ve been playing around with chiaroscuro again. This time I was using Copic markers and coloured pencils.
This is a portrait of Nob from Sktchy. The portrait was an experiment to see if the coloured pencil chiaroscuro method I learned last week would work with ballpoint pens. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
This is drawn on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app, from an inspiration photo posted by Melissa on Sktchy. I usually title my portraits with the name of the inspiration but I don’t know the name of the subject of Melissa’s photo so I’ve used the shortened non-gendered version of her name, Mel, as the title of the portrait and this post.
I’ve been taking a course by artist Marco Mazzoni on the Domestika teaching platfom on drawing chiaroscuro portraits with coloured pencils. Chiaroscuro is a Italian term for a technique which uses strongly contrasting light and dark to create art.
This portrait of Kaitlin from Sktchy is the first one I’ve created using the technique I ’ve been learning in this course. I need a lot of practice but I’m pretty happy with this for a first attempt.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Marco Mazzoni’s course you can find information about it here.
This is another page from my sketchbook for Brooklyn Art Library’s “The Sketchbook Project 2021”. I chose the theme “no erasing” because I wanted to use ballpoint pens throughout the sketchbook and the title of my book is “Screen Queens”. This queen is Amelie, played by Audrey Tautou.
drawing faces 