Every so often we all have crises of confidence. I’m having one at the moment. I’m wondering if that’s because I’m not drawing as often as usual. I do know that I don’t want to post many of my portraits. I’m not sure it’s about the drawing to be honest, I think it’s more about a crisis of confidence more generally.
What I do know is that only way to get around it is to get through it bu keeping on drawing and posting. So here is today’s portrait of Andrea from Sktchy, drawn on my iPad Pro.
This is Johanna from Sktchy. She has an incredible face to draw, so full of interest and character and those glasses are a perfect framing device for portrait drawing. I always start my drawing with eyes unless the subject is wearing glasses, in which case I start with the glasses and work out from there.
I drew Johanna with a Unipin dark grey brush pen, painted her with Daniel Smith watercolour and finished up with Prismacolor coloured pencils, all in a Fabriano Venezia sketchbook.
This is Emma from Sktchy painted with Daniel Smith watercolours and finished with watercolour pencils. I haven’t quite got the angle right – in the inspiration photo her face is upturned and I haven’t quite captured that here which is why her eyes look too far up in her head. I think they’re positioned correctly but I haven’t got the tilt of the neck and chin right so it looks weird. I also totally lost her likeness but you wouldn’t know that if I didn’t tell you because you don’t know what she looks like, right?
My second portrait for my “Screen Queens” sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project 2021 is Zoë Washburne from the cult TV show Firefly and the movie Serenity, played by the very awesome Gina Torres. Firefly is definitely in my top 10 favourite TV shows ever and Zoë is a totally badass.
This is another portrait from the Sktchy portrait course “Drawing Anatomy with Tiffany”. This is Beata and the focus was meant to be on her ear, though I had the most fun with her nose and eye as usual. I used Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils.
This has been a long slow draw over a few days but I got there in the end. It’s a portrait of Jeeb from Sktchy for the “mouth” class of my Sktchy portrait anatomy class. I decided to use ballpoint pen for the portrait because I find mouths so hard to draw with ballpoints. Mouths are definitely my Achilles heel anyway ; they are unquestionably the facial feature I find the hardest to get right and I really struggle to get that roundness with ballpoint pens. Anyway I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out and I managed to draw teeth and they look OK!
This year I am participating in Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project for the fourth time. I missed a year last year but signed up again this year in November but have only just received my sketchbook – the first one the library sent out to me went missing in the pandemic post so they dispatched a replacement in January which finally arrived on Friday.
I’ve decided that my sketchbook this year will be a celebration of some of my favourite female characters on screen and I’m going to draw them all in ballpoint pen to fit with the Sketchbook Project 2021 theme of “No Erasing”. And who better to fill the first page of my sketchbook than Ser Brienne of Tarth?
I totally lost the likeness in this ballpoint pen drawing of Appollonia from Sktchy yet it’s one of my favourite drawings ever. Why? Because I think there’s a really comic book quality to it and it’s the first time I’ve seen that in one of my own drawings. I’m a huge consumer of graphic novels so perhaps it was inevitable that something of what I was seeing in those books would eventually show up in my work but I never really expected it to. And I’m so excited now I’ve seen it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it again but I do hope so.
I’ve been plagued with killer migraines for almost a week so haven’t done any drawing for days but what a face to return to. This is Matt from Sktchy and he was great drawing practice for eyes and a nose especially!
More nose drawing today for this portrait of Christopher, drawin on my iPad Pro using the Procreate app.
drawing faces 