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Portraits from memory or the imagination

I made three attempts -

  1. A sketch of an imaginary pale-skinned girl, on grey mount board in Indian Ink and white gouache.

I’ve got a feeling this image has been in my mind since I was a child, or perhaps this is the way I imagined pretty girls look. I was trying to get some three-dimensionality but don’t think I achieved it. The main thing I see wrong is that the eyes, though probably proportionally right, are empty, there is no emotion coming from them.

The exercise did however serve as an experiment with the medium and the support for my assignment.

  1. A sketch of a dark-skinned woman with curly hair, in Indian Ink on A3 cartridge paper, applied with a rigger

I attempted to draw the figure with the face turned slightly to the side but the proportions don’t look right - the eyes are too close together, the nose is too long and thin, and the chin is too long making her look a bit like a man. Once again there is no emotion on the eyes

  1. Profile portrait of a man, in soft pastel to give more colour to the work, on A3 dark blue paper.

After my research on faces and anatomy I tried to give some impression of muscle on the upper body of an adult male in this exercise. I think this is a more believable face and it was easier to get the proportions of the face in profile. It reminds me of a Greek athlete.

In terms of What is a portrait?

Some of the definitions found in my research -

A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intention is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person

A portrait is typically defined as a representation of a specific individual such as the artist might meet in life. A good portrait doesn't merely record someone’s features however, it says something about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a real person’s presence.

Regarding the portraits I did for this exercise, they are merely representations of features without reference to any particular person, and as such they probably inevitably lack expression, personality and presence. I found it very difficult to do a face without any reference at all.


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