For this exercise, the section gets going by throwing you into trying to create quickly and instinctively. I was pleased that the exercise again gave three different avenues to choose from. Originally I had hoped to choose an option away from my comfort zone; I was particularly intrigued by the model-making option.
However, at the time that I was completing the task, it was shortly after my brush with disaster in the crushed conservatory. So all of my equipment was scattered across the house, and space to complete the work was at a premium.
So instead I opted to choose the continuous-line drawings. As it was designed to be a number of portraits, I decided to use a resource I have used many times before to try and improve my drawing skills for faces and expressions: This Person Does Not Exist is a site that uses AI to generate completely artificial portrait photos. It offers a limitless resource to work from. Putting the webpage on my TV, I sat down and used my fountain pen and sketchbook to quickly capture a series of portraits, taking only 2-3 minutes for each one. My son did the exercise with me, but he used the images to practice doing his own cartoon-like faces, playing around with different ways to depict eyes, noses and other facial features. Here are the faces we drew from:
And here are the sketchbook pages with my continuous line portraits:
I really enjoyed working with my fountain pen again, and it cemented for me that I have an affinity for working with pen and ink in my process. I also really enjoyed working fast - the ink also contributed to helping me to commit to my mark-making and deal with 'mistakes' or unintended movement. What was unusual for me was trying to do these kinds of portraits is that normally I do them 'blind' (not looking at the page). I found it unusual to actually look at the paper and the faces. I certainly made the images more accurate, but working so quickly still had the common impact of making the facial landmarks difficult to hit accurately. But I quite like the idiosyncrasies - they add a stylistic flavour but I can still tell it's the characters in the photos.
I wonder if this approach could be used with other media, perhaps paint? Could it form the underlying sketch for a portrait painting? I am thinking that it could be interesting to try that. Off the top of my head, I can think of two options:
Perhaps combine with washes of watercolour and/or gouache.
Do the continuous line painting using acrylic marker pens to act as a combination sketch/underpainting.
I think exploring these options might be a good fit for the ideas I have for my self-directed project in stage 4.
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