Visual arts are all about seeing. When you can see something you can pursue it: clumsily, haltingly, frustratingly perhaps. However, if you can’t see a glimmer of that thing, all the skills in the world are for naught. Michelangelo said “I saw an angel in the marble and set him free”. In this course I’ll cover  some sound portraiture skills as well as a few ideas about creativity and visualizing.

 

Portrait basics in dry media.

Gesture, contour and preliminary studies in dry media. Observation and expression. Layout of the head.

 

 

 

A Young Girl by Ambrose McEnvoy

A few years back, whilst browsing an exhibition of the Tate U.K.’s collection of drawings, I noticed this little study by a lesser known artist Ambrose McEnvoy (1878-1927).  Simple and effective in many ways, it shows the essence of image making. The almost arbitrary sweep of the gestural brush, clean contour definition for the profile and the simple blocking of values (light, mid-tone and dark), display three essential elements of drawing.

For me, a good drawing invariably carries some gesture, an immediacy that comes of the artist’s initial response to the subject. As the song goes: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!

A clean definition, in places, is essential, and this would be my second tenet. The ability to follow a contour is an exercise in pure observation.

Thirdly, drawings have presence through  solidity of modelling with good values (light and dark), very often as simple as possible. Edward Manet advised to model the lightest lights and darkest darks, commenting that often little was then required in between.

In this simple study, McEnvoy’s study has all of these, plus it’s completed with a simple wash. No wonder I like it!

Drawing Studies.

Let’s get started with two great drawing studies:

A. Gestural drawing

 

An important aspect of art which is often neglected is the “gesture”. Perhaps most commonly applied to the figure drawing, a gestural approach can equally be applied to any subject. If you can draw and paint it, there is an opportunity for gesture. I’m not going to describe exactly how to approach a gesture – it’s a personal approach: a quickly executed and intuitive response. It imbues work with a free-flowing beauty that shines on in more developed studies. I commence many art classes with gestural work: It’s a great a warm-up to any studio session, however the enduring value is to underpin your longer studies and finished works with it.

Exercise:

1. Take subjects around the house, on video or from the Reference Gallery and quickly complete 10 gestural studies – each under 2 minutes… if you can, in under one minute! By all means nest some together on one or two large pages.
2. Choose a couple of these studies and continue working for perhaps a further 5 minutes each…don’t start again…work over the gestural studies that you have started…this keeps things fresh.

B. Continuous-Contour Drawing

Here’s a drawing exercise which is poles apart from the quick and intuitive gesture studies, although as with gesture, the technique seems to be most widely applied in figurative work …… in reality, it’s as much fun for drawing anything!

The idea is to develop a drawing with a single line. A pure, continuous-contour approach develops a drawing with a single line, like running a thread over the contours that you see. One objective is to slow the drawing process, resulting in as much observed detail as possible. It’s primarily an exercise in observation – most of the time should be spent looking at the reference and only briefly glancing at the drawing paper. The result might look somewhat stilted, and that does not matter: In fact, I prefer to do this exercise with my non-drawing hand, just to make sure I really concentrate on the path of my line and understandably, this helps me go as slowly as I can. The more you look, the more you see – all those little details to fascinate!

Exercise:

1. Take subjects around the house, on video or from the Reference Gallery and create 4 contour drawings (pen or pencil), just drawing anything that you see, for 5 minutes apiece. Start anywhere on the subject and don’t lift your hand from the paper. When you feel your hand speeding up, make a conscious effort to slow down: that’s where the details lie. When you come to a dead end, backtrack along the line-path: what I sometimes do is ease pressure and deliberately move to another spot on the paper, often trailing a ghosted line as I go, just to be as deliberate as possible. Try one with your non-drawing hand!
   
2. Draw each of your hands from life using the same a continuous contour technique. Yes, this means you have to  use your non-drawing hand! Take about 5 minutes for each one.
3. Finally, draw a quick gesture and then keep drawing, switching to contour style on the same drawing. Here, you’re combining the 2 techniques: quick gestural marks and slow and deliberate contours. I call this “drawing fast and slow” – fast so you intuitively react to the image and slow, so that you move into careful observation mode: combining two complementary aspects of drawing.

Laying out a portrait

In organizing the layout of a portrait, and in this case a drawn portrait, the preceding exercises are very useful. In the following video you will notice that I start very loosely, in a gestural way, looking to capture the shapes and dynamics of the pose. Even with head and shoulders there’s a dynamic in how the head and face are held with the shoulders (look at which one is highest!). Later in the video, I switch to contour drawing to get a better definition of form.

 

In summary, my three tenets of portraiture are:

1. Focus on the large shapes – The “Head Shape”  – including how the shoulders are held, drawing what you see, quickly, gesturally at first, with perhaps a little slow and steady contour drawing to define and refine.
2. Look and check for the eye positioning – in the center vertically with a neutral viewpoint – which is quite common in portraiture. Be sure to give enough space above the eyes to house all those brains!
3. Remember the above!

Exercise:

1. Choose a “head and shoulders” composition from the Reference Gallery or use a reference of your own (in this case send me both your exercise and the reference photo).
2. Develop the portrait in any dry media of your choice. Start with some gestural marks (don’t rub them out, eh – I want to see them) and include some clear contour line-work in places.