When I started t paint, I use to paint "half portrait", painting just one side of a face. I did it for a simple reason: my hubby (who is also my teacher in art), during the first lessons, said that measures are really important when you sketch/paint something, you have to pay attention to the distance from the eyes, from an eye to the nose, the lenght of the face, etc. You can think it's simple, but it's not so simple, believe me! hen you draw the first times you tend to draw what you think about that face, not what you see in that face. You can try: watch a pic and draw it without pay attention to the measures, after you have to try to draw it paying attention to the measures (you can use a measuring stick). You can see the difference from the drawings you did!
So, to exercise myself on portraits, I used to paint just a single side of face to have the right measures in a very simple way ^_^
After many exercises you can see that your skills are good enough to draw/sketch without a measuring stick. Have you ever seen a painter who watch the subject that he/she are painting using his thumb or his brush to observe the measures? Yes, it's because in some kind of paintings measures are really important. :P
The sketch of today, as you can see, is an half of my face. I sketched it using a black pencil and a piece of charcoal.
As usual, I took a couple of photos of the process too.
At first I sketch the single elements on the paper (the eye, the nose, the mouth) pay attention to the measures of the elements and to the distance between them. When I observe a face that I want to draw I focus my eyes on every element and not on the entire face (have you ever heard about Gestalt Theory? ^_^)
"Deconstruct" what you are watching help you to observe the details, so it's a good exercise to do ;)
After the first lines of the elements I sketched the form of the face and I added the shadows :
Fast, useful, simple. Another exercise of my daily habits to improve my skills ^^
See ya soon
Silvia
