Heads heads heads

We shifted focus this week to the head, which I was pretty chuffed about because I consider myself to avoid head details when doing a bodily sketch – there’s just something about them that leaves you extra vulnerable to fuck ups if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Front-ish and side views from our model in class.

I was particularly fascinated with all of the little negative spaces I could use to work from, like the little slivers of face peeking out from behind the nose in the front-ish view. A really pleasant exercise.

For homework we were tasked with drawing our own head two times. The emphasis was on the head – not as a self portrait but purely as an object of interest.

So off I went to fetch a mirror so I could look at myself while I drew. Then I thought, what if I drew on the mirror, how would that translate? I gave it a crack, sitting at ground level and peering around, I had to squint which was reflected in the work for better or worse. What I found most interesting about this one was that no matter how close or far I was from the mirror, my head was ALWAYS the same size on the surface itself. CREEPY.

On completion, I sent this selfie to a classmate, which ended up informing my next piece.

I found that although the outlines of my head were factually a good representation of my facial structure, the photo of myself within this selfie still looked far more lifelike. So what if I were to work from a selfie instead of life? How would that look?

Wonder no longer!

The feedback from this piece was that the strength of line in the beluga-whale neck rolls weighted the drawing down and your eye goes right there… which was actually what I had intended, so not sure if I should consider that a win, or a criticism. I think I’ll reflect on it as both.

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