Face

nose

This week we all worked on facial features, focusing on the nose, eyes, ears and neck.  We modeled for each other, which I have to say was extremely difficult for me.  I think my body runs on pure adrenaline so sitting still for even a half hour made me so sleepy, I kept nodding off!  Drawing from a personal model where you could get right up close to see the forms and plane changes was helpful to me, especially since I have not drawn a face from life or even tried to draw a realistic face for over a year!

nose, eye, mouth

I had completely forgotten how to draw the nose, but thanks to Amy's guidance, I slowly figured it out after a couple of long poses.  I tried the eyes on the second pose and did a much better job at remembering the structure, but as far as how well I drew them, I will leave that up for comments.  I always think I can improve.  I also tried to draw the mouth even though that was not what we were specifically working on.  I felt that I would struggle the most with this part of the face as I did in Life Drawing 1.  As you can see, I struggled again, it is difficult to figure out how to show the roundness both of the upper and lower lip individually as well as get them to look like they wrap around the jaw.  Mine look flat because I could not quite figure this part out.  The last section I practiced was the neck and as Amy said, we do not typically practice this enough so mine was a simple line drawing.  The neck muscles are so subtle, especially on women (as my model was) it will be easier I think when we do our final portraits to capture that subtle form  with shading.

neck

I only wish we could have had maybe one more day or even a half day to practice drawing the face before we started the final portraits.  On Wednesday we got our paper and learned more about drawing facial features, especially the neck, but let out early without starting to draw anything, which was great!  But in retrospect I could have definitely used the practice.