Drawing & Painting the Head

DRAWING & PAINTING THE HEAD

In case you missed the drawing class this week,
here are a few highlights...

I think of Helen Van Wyk when I teach about structure and volume in drawing and painting. She often talks about painting apples. When you paint an apple, hold an apple in your hand, take a bite of out it, think about the roundness of that apple. When you paint a head, you are painting a 3 dimensional object like an apple, on a flat surface. That spherical shape will have dark, medium, light and high lighted areas, along with a front, side, top or bottom, depending on eye level. It is very helpful to place an imaginary box over the head in the beginning to define these shapes. 

As Sargent indicated in his teaching, getting the feel of that head as a mass is vital. We often jump right into the features without one thought about the volume of the whole head. 

"and under his hands, a head would be an amazing likeness long before he had so much as indicated the features themselves. In fact, it seemed to me the mouth and nose just happened with the modeling of the cheeks, and one eye, living luminous, had been placed in the socket so carefully prepared for it (like a poached egg dropped on a plate, he described the process)..."

Mary Newbold Patterson Hale, in The World Today (November 1927)

 http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/sargent.html

I found the following website and YouTube videos by Stan Prokopenko to be very helpful.

Website for other drawing videos - http://www.proko.com/videos/