This morning during church I was sketching a guy in the pew in front of me. I enjoy sketching in church–it actually helps me concentrate, plus its a good opportunity to draw people who are sitting still:)
Now, these aren’t great sketches or anything, but I wanted to post them here because I wanted to share what I learned doing them (shout out to my 17 month old son Ethan for his wonderful coloring work, and my horrible misspelling of the word “palatable”). All three profile sketches are, again, of the same dude. The one on the top right and bottom left were done first. They were done quickly, and have the feel of caricatures. In both cases, the eyes are high up on the head and the upper lip is elongated. Both of them were drawn starting from the top: forehead line, nose line, upper lip line, lower lip line, chin, etc. This kind of drawing has a way of stretching things out for me because I’m not placing the features on any pre-existing form. I don’t mind these caricatures. I think they are fun, but honestly, this wasn’t the intention.
On the final drawing I didn’t slow down, but I simply decided to draw two major guidelines to help my profile–the line following the forehead down to the nose, and another line following the nose down to the chin. If you look closely you can see them. This simple step helped me to quickly place the features within this structure, thus ensuring the eyes are correctly placed, the upper lip, lower lip, and chin properly recede, etc. The result is clearly the most accurate drawing, and this process was a helpful reminder to me–not only in building a structured drawing, but also the importance of warming up. You need to get your brain and hand working together. You need to sketch a bit before you’re in the groove, or the flow.
So, in summary, 1) build a structure to put details on, 2) warm-up, and 3) sketch in church:)