FACEPOCALYPSE

Our model today was an interesting lady. She was into numerology and various name-related offshoots.

She seemed pretty spiritual, like a lot of people here in SF, and has changed her name quite a few times. I don’t recall an exact number, except she said at intervals of 7 years she’d change her name and start a new chapter of her life. She said she’s analysed strengths and weaknesses of past names and had synchronicity that led her to each new name.

I thought it was pretty interesting because I’ve never really felt like a Simon. Her belief was that her name affected the direction of her life, but under her grounds for getting a name change I don’t see any reason to change mine. I have no problems with how my life’s going. In fact, I like the amount of responsiveness I have to everything happening!

This all came up in relation to a sequence of events that caused her to be late for our life drawing session. Turns out she’d changed her name again this morning, to Ishta if I recall correctly.

And now some Nu Pastel drawings. Dark green and pale yellow on halftone paper.

Another portrait for Media class; one of my housemates this time. I’m trying to push my mark making and explore other stylistic approaches. It’s kind of based on one of Nicolai Fechin’s techniques, with a bit of improvised scratchy pencil over the top.

Tools used: graphite block, smudge stick, kneadable eraser, 2H and 4B pencils.

I also found that if I use a sharp 2H pencil to draw it digs the line into the page so when you go over with the graphite block those lines remain light. This could be useful! I must experiment further.

Turned in my portrait project today and am now inspired to do more caricatures. I got some help from Jon Foster along the way. He opened my eyes to edge quality by messing them all up to round the form. I had very crisp edges pre-Fosterisation.

Mostly did this to add a pencil rendering to my portfolio. I took a bit of liberty with proportions though. And by a bit I mean a lot – the shoulders are massivebroad but I cropped the drawing.

I was also thinking about something m’lady said recently. We were looking at Dirk Dzimirsky’s life-like renderings and I was questioning why people do that, and its appeal in terms of ‘fine art’. She said she liked the thought of someone putting so much care into their work and it kind of stuck with me. I haven’t made anything really detail-focussed in a long time. While my drawing has nothing on Dirks’ and I only spent a few days on it, I did get the sense of labouring over something, especially when drawing every scale on Robert the bobtail.

Did this family portrait commission for my uncle’s 50th. They requested a portrait (30″x40″) of them all walking, holding hands and provided a handful of references to work from.

Getting a likeness in faces is no light task! Especially in full colour, over-shading/lighting can warp the face and make it look off even if all the features are correctly positioned.

Here’s a closer look at some faces.

Something pretty non-exhaustive this evening – A lighting study of Emily Haines from Metric.

I was deciding on my vote for the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2009, and after watching the clip for Drumming Song I thought a portrait sketch of Florence Welch would aptly tie in with a Hottest 100 blog post. After all, she is quite the hot sauce, with flame red locks to match.

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This portrait was commissioned for a 21st birthday, and there’s even a stepped work-in-progress image below! It stands at 40″x30″ so it’s a pretty sizeable piece of art!