Side Portaits
I’m starting on portraits next. First up is the side portrait. As a “warm-up” exercise, the book had me copy a painting called Madame Pierre Gautreau by John Singer Sargent (1883). It is just a “simple” line drawing with no colors, lights or shadows. The main point is to teach the proper location of facial features so that heads look correct instead of, what she likes to call, “cut-off-skull error”. I have never been able to do portraits or faces. But the author explains where everything goes… the eye is always halfway down the face. The back of the ear is always the same distance as from the corner of your eye to the bottom of your face. The bottom of your ear lines up with the space between your nose and mouth. After all of the author’s advice, it amazingly becomes rather easy. Or at the very least, it isn’t very difficult anymore. So here is my first portrait line drawing… followed by the actual line drawing done by John Singer Sargent.
The only aid I used was cross-hairs on my drawing to make sure the placement of the ear and nose were accurate. Then I dropped the cross-hairs and sketched the rest while staring at the picture in my drawing book. It came out pretty well. Took me about a half an hour to sketch… then another half an hour to make sure everything was where it belonged… the nose was the biggest pain.
Thalia is having fun in her new music and swimming classes. In music class yesterday, the teacher brought out hula hoops. All of the moms held them up and the children crawled through them like a tunnel. Thalia is by far the youngest in the group, but she went right through the tunnel as soon as she saw it. The teacher was really impressed and said that kids never do that at her age and it shows great independence. I think it just shows how much she loves tunnels…
