Intense Portraits and a Poetic Battle with Coloured Pencils

This week’s “Drawing a Head” was a day of intense observation and our task was to slowly render a face with biro (oh no) starting from the nose out. Biro is a medium I have a natural disdain towards, but once I got going the process was actually quite therapeutic. We began with self-portraits using old, distorted mirrors (to get a closer look at our skin?) that were quite difficult to draw from - I think half of my drawing looks a bit like me, as for the rest God knows.

Blank Stare, Biro on Paper

“You want to make a potrait of a mind rather than a portrait just of the face.”

My First Shot at Coloured Pencil

Tuesday was the day I was supposed to become a coloured pencil master but I quickly came to realise that in the morning session, I was taking a completely wrong approach. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to try and mix the exact colours of the Luca Giordano painting I was studying (near impossible), so I ended up with a bit of a frustrated mess:

First Attempt with Colouring Pencils

I got so ticked off with this drawing that I did a smaller, more refreshing study in my sketchbook just before lunch which set a better tone for the afternoon:

Pre lunch sketchbook study

In the afternoon I played my pencils a bit smarter. I chose a very limited colour scheme and got to work trying to decode the composition as a whole rather than catch every last detail. This resulted in the drawing becoming more abstract, but the afternoon was certainly more successful than the morning (I’m going to continue this drawing next week).

Limited Palette Study, Pencil on Paper

Half a Story

For “Drawing a Story” I had to leave early due to a tutorial so I only got half the day. For the morning we were tasked with charcoal exercises and we were drawing from poetry for the first time. Drawing from poetry was far more challenging than I thought it would be as there isn’t as much of a solid environment and narrative to necessarily pull from (at least in my head). Charcoal was also not being my friend so I stubbornly switched to colouring pencils in my sketchbook after a while.

hello it's ya boy bad drawing

I’m keeping this week’s blog post short and sweet, forgive me for the slightly late posting but please do sign up if you’d like to be notified of next week's post! (Already have some good work cooking for this week).

See ya next week,
Tomas