FOUNDATIONS in Portrait Drawing

Volume 1Michael R. Britton

FOUNDATIONS inPortrait Drawing

Volume 1

Table of Contents

Lesson 1: The Arabesque: A Dynamic Correspondence – Page 3

Lesson 2: About Looking: Breaking Symbolic Preconceptions – Page 11

Lesson 3: Plasticity: Form & Value – Page 18

Lesson 4: The Value of Tone – Page 24

Lesson 5: Understanding Planes: Achieving 3-Dimensionality – Page 31

The Facial Features

Drawing Expressive Eyes: Tone, Form & Anatomy – Page 38

Understanding the Nose – Page 43

Anatomy of a Smile – Page 49

The Ear: Five Easy Pieces – Page 57

Lesson 6: Drawing the Profile View – Page 63

Lesson 7: Drawing with a Sculptural Sensibility – Page 69

© 2010. All rights reserved.

Tools for Portrait Drawing

The first volume of Foundations in Portrait Drawing is comprised of seven portrait draw-ing lessons that were originally written for my drawing students and subscribers of my Drawing E-Zine. Over the years they have proved very popular and, more importantly, effective in teaching how to draw portraits. I have also included four chapters on the facial features.

For your course of study begin with the first lesson on drawing the arabesque and pro-ceed with each lesson in order. Many artists also refer to the arabesque as the contour; I prefer the term arabesque as it implies rhythm and movement whereas contour is more static. Terminology implies intent and, as such, it is important.

I have deliberately kept my drawings for these lessons accessible to the beginning artist. I do not think that teaching should be a ‘look at me’ endeavor instead I have rendered the drawings so that they impart the lesson without needlessly obfuscating the pertinent issues with highly polished work. Learning involves seeing what goes on behind the stage.

Included in Volume 1 are four full-page size photographs of the models used in many of these lessons that you can print out and use for your drawing practice and study.

Foundations in Portrait Drawing, Volume 2 continues your learning process at an intermediate level.

The art materials required for these lessons are quite simple: my preference is the Staedtler Mars Lumograph Pencils. They are available in a large range of softness to hardness. The 8B is the softest, whereas the 8H is the hardest pencil. For these lessons you will only need the 8B, HB and 2H or 4H. You can expand on these of course. A few small pieces of medium grade vine charcoal are useful for blocking-in. You can also use the 8B pencil for blocking in.

As valuable as your pencils in the kneaded eraser. These are usually gray square wrapped in cellophane. The kneaded eraser is meant to rolled up and kneaded in your hand which warms up the eraser and proffers a wide range of painterly possibilites in addition to correcting mislaid lines.

My preferred paper is the Fabriano Ingres ivory or buff colored. You may or may not like this paper too but I suggest trying out a variety of different brands of charcoal drawing paper. At this early stage, though, keep with the light colors.

For sharpening my pencils I use a safety razor blade and medium grade sandpaper to sharpen the leads to about 1 1⁄2” tapered to a very fine point. A thin knitting needle and plumb-bob (See Lesson 6) are also very useful for checking the measures of your drawings.

Plasticity: Form & Value

The third element of drawing, in addition to shape and proportion, is Tone. A better term for tone, or shading, is plasticity. What I mean by plasticity is

the visual push and pull of lights and darks which, when presented in a cohesive whole, define the 3-dimensional-ity of the portrait. In other words, plasticity is giving form.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which is the one I use, defines Tone as a quality of color and harmony. For our drawing purposes I think harmony expresses Tone best.

This same, worn dictionary defines Value as the relation of one part of a picture to others in respect of light and shade.

The human eye is capable of discerning a large range of values. However, in drawing we need to ‘trick’ the eye into believing that it is seeing more than is actually there. This trick uses our innate sense of closure: when we are looking at a drawing our mind’s eye actually finishes the drawing for the artist. However, there is a caveat to this: the viewer cannot find closure in a drawing that is not in har-mony - what it does instead is to dismiss the draw-ing. Sort of like a ‘does not compute’. Drawings that satisfy the eye’s demand for closure are those that engage us emotionally. We bind with them. The issue of harmony is an immense subject - it is made all the more complex when we consider abstracted portrait drawings, I’m thinking of Matisse and Paul Klee, here. I will narrow the field here to realistic portraiture.

Matisse, Gold Fish, 1912

Michael Britton, Head Study, 2004

Portrait Drawing: Lesson 3

The craft of drawing, the technical skills - which is what the Mastering Portrait Drawing workshops are all about - are the means by which we strive to engage the viewer emotionally.

Let’s begin with the terms of Value. In every beginning painting class the student’s first assignment is the 12-step Value bar ranging from pure white to pure black. To better understand how a form is rendered we need to understand the logic of light.

Light travels in straight lines and weakens significantly with distance traveled. As a form turns away from the light source it darkens. Also, two planes facing the light will have different values depending upon their distance from the light source. An example of this is the cheeks - the cheek closer to the light source will have a lighter value than the other which is further from the light. Although it is a matter of only a few inches, light diminishes mathematically, not arithmetically.

The lightest value seen on a form is the Highlight. The highlight is invariably on the plane that is directly facing the light source.

The bulk of a portrait’s tone is the half-tone. These are innumerable and are affected by color, texture, form and plane. I find the rendering of half-tones to be, simultaneously, the most enjoyable and the most frus-trating aspect of drawing.

As the form turns fully away from the light source it descends into shadow, towards black, which is the absence of light. When we twist the Value bar into an elliptical shape we can see how the half-tones gradually darken. This is a crude example, but it illustrates light’s logic well.

In placing the features of the face there is a serious misconception that immediately leads beginning art-ists astray. That misconception presents the features of the face as being proportioned by thirds (that is, the eyes are halfway, the nose a third of the way down, so, too, with the mouth). As with all misconceptions, there is a grain of truth to it. The problem is that these are general, and approximate, proportions; to achieve a likeness and ‘sense of life and spirit’ the proportions of the portrait you are drawing must be spot on. Then there are those who have long noses or short, pudgy noses. The ‘rule of thirds’ sort of works only when you are looking straight on at the sitter. You can make the necessary adjustments of course, but things can quickly become muddled. And once things become muddled, every artist no matter what their level falls back onto their sense of symbolic preconceptions – what they think something should look like rather than its true appearance. The result is a litany of portrait drawings that pretty much all look the same.

Another problem with this ‘Rule of Thirds’ is how does one deal with a fore-shortened head?

A

AB

B

In my drawing Verna the placement of the eyes is definitely not half-way between the top of the head and the chin. In fact, beginning with the placement of the eyes is probably the worst way to initiate a portrait drawing.

The so-called ‘Rule of Thirds’ does not work for either of these portrait drawings.

A smile is the product of a com-plex series of muscle actions. First, we need to understand the construction of the mouth:

The mouth is much more than the red lips. The mouth region extends from the base of the nose to the Mentolabial Sulcus, the sulk line of the chin. The mouth is a convex form – it wraps around the muzzle of the face. This wrapping convex shape is best appreciated in the 7/8’s profile. In the frontal view the mouth must express this convex shape.

I always begin the mouth by articulat-ing the Interstice, the horizontal line where the upper and lower lips meet. The lips wrap around the convex pro-jection of the dental arch and the Interstice roughly corresponds to the middle portion of the frontal, upper teeth.

The Nodes of the mouth are lower than the middle of the Interstice, except in a smile when the facial muscles pull up the Nodes. Note how I have simplified the interstice with straight, architectonic lines carefully observing the structure.

Raphael Santi, Detail of The Three Graces, 1518

There are many modes of drawing; linear, tonal, gestural, etc. In this month’s tutorial I will focus on carving out form with a sculp-tural sensibility.

This approach to drawing is very much like working with clay except that we are working on paper, of course, and using our fingers, stump and kneaded eraser as our sculpture tools.

The drawing materials that I am using are black contè (sharpened to a fine point), kneaded eraser, a small paper stump and my fingers. The paper is Ivory colored Fabriano Ingres.

Drawing with a Sculptural Sensibility

Portrait Drawing: Lesson 7