Something a bit different - Portraiture! (And a very long post!)

So, I went to my first (ever in my life) Portraiture class yesterday.  Here are the two portraits (same model believe it or not). My A3 paper won't fit on my scanner fully so she's a bit hemmed in and had a few bits lopped off. And the scan has come up a bit light as I had to dismantle the lid of the scanner to get her in!

The set up of it was similar to the way a life drawing class is set up - apart from there are no willies on display, obviously! We could work at easels or at these things that look a bit like a wooden weight lifting bench that you sit on. I chose one of those and had my paper on a board balanced somewhere between the post rest at the front of the bench and my baby bump! To be honest, I'd never seen one of these bench things in my life before and although they really make your bum hurt after a while, the position it puts you into was really good for pregnancy!

I chose to work in soft pencil (I used a B) because the whole point of me going to a portraiture class is to learn to draw faces better. I know that sounds obvious but when I sketch I really struggle with getting the face to look like anything I am happy with. The whole sketch looks nice and loosely drawn but then the face looks rigid because I get nervous about making the mark. And obviously hesitating is pretty counter-productive when you are doing very quick sketches of people who are moving about. So my thinking is that if I go to a portraiture class then a) I can pick up some tips as to how to draw faces, b) spend some time actually studying a face that isn't moving around, and c) most importantly, know that I've done a portraiture class which will give me some belief that I can actually draw faces!

I found using the soft pencil quite a challenge as I'm so used to using pen which of course you can't rub out! Also, the model holds the poses for a really long time. The class is 2 1/2 hours long and the model holds the same pose for the whole session! We do have a break halfway through though! Most people in the class worked on the same portrait for the whole session - some use pastels and oils etc. I was a bit daunted by this as I've never spent that long on drawing one person. Even in life drawing classes I've been to the maximum pose time has been about 40 minutes. But as I am there to try and work on some accuracy, once I'd got all the model's features down on the paper, the tutor came over and helped me make her look more like her. There was quite a lot of reworking of the position of width of her face and position of her ear.  It was really helpful and the first picture was finished in just over and hour. The tutor pointed out that I must be very used to sketching because I draw so fast!!  He suggested that after break I move to another part of the room and do another one from a different angle, rather than keep working on the same one as that would be more suited to my style.

This second portrait took the same amount of time as the first but I had got more confident and so got her features in the correct places more quickly so I spent some time working on light and shade. This freaked me out at first as I personally don't like shading with a pencil, I mean not in the traditional, blend it all in type of way. I started doing a bit of the scribbly shading but felt that was going to ruin the picture so eventually I settled on hatching and cross-hatching her. Surprisingly, I like the way she's turned out. It just feels so weird to draw on such a big scale and not have those punchy black lines of a pen. She needed a little more shading under her left eye I think as at the moment she looks like she's been in a fight but the class ended at that point.

Equipment: B pencil, Daler Rowney 220gsm Heavy Weight Fine Grain Paper A3