Portrait: Hands On

Now, I will share with you one of the portrait drawn by me. This picture is of a female actor taken from an entertainment magazine. I drew this using a mechanical pencil with standard 2B lead.



First, I drew the basic head structure--in this case, the head is slightly slanted. Next, I drew the eyes, nose, and mouth. In this stage, mistakes are quite common, as you can notice it especially in the left eye and the chin.

I have repaired the mistakes, and here is what it looked like:

Next, I added details to her eyes, and nose...

More details on her lips, and some part of her hair...

Here is the finished product. Guess who is the actress?

To make the drawing permanent, I sprayed it with fixative--in which I will show you in the next post.

Portrait

A portrait, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is "a painting, photograph, drawing, etc. of a person or, less commonly, of a group of people".


As an introduction, here are some useful information which I quoted from Wikipedia:

A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.



Among the earliest known portrait in history are funeral portraits. Yes, funeral portrait is a term given to realistic painted portraits--usually drawn on a wood attached to the mummies.
Here are two examples of funeral portraits from ancient Egypt:

Roman-Egyptian funeral portrait of a young boy and a woman.

At present, I am working on to improve my portrait drawing skills. By the way, my blog picture is my-self portrait, with some fault in it. Perfection will only come after a lot of practice.

 This is a picture that I had drawn using the method that I have shown earlier. I had just drew it yesterday from a magazine. Remember; larger picture gives more details.

As the foundation for my drawing, I did the raw outline of the picture.

Next. I put the details in his face. It is up to you on where to begin your details, but I prefer the face as most expressions are expressed through the face of the character. This person have a confident, but rather sarcastic expression.

I added more details on his shirt...

And finally, details on his arms and the umbrella.

Human Figure: Hands On

First, there are nothing "easy" in art. It takes lots and lots of practice in order to master certain skills--in this case, drawing human figure.

This is a picture from a newspaper that I drew on October 2010. I used to focus on the drawings of human figure. Here are some tips if you are interested in drawing it:

1) Have the right equipment. You must at least have a pencil and an eraser. Your mood and ideas will be limited by not having the right equipment.

2) Study the structure of human body. I strongly recommend you to study the muscular structure of human beings; in order to understand the proportions and how our body structure changes as we move.

Note that human of different gender and age have different body structure. Therefore, do you research on these four character: boy, adult male, girl, and adult female.

3) Practice makes perfect. You must have lots and lots of practice. It might look hard at first, but never give up. If you think you had enough practice, just think about this; I once knew one guy who practiced drawing six hours a day! Can you beat that?

Below is the picture that I drew by referring to a newspaper. I would not say it is perfect, as I myself is in a learning process.

This is how I draw it, step by step:

 This is a picture of a female model, therefore it explains her thin body figure.

In this step, I sketch the raw outline.

 In this step, more details are included, such as the hair, dress, and shoes.

This is the final product; after which I included more details on her face and dress. I even used shadings for a more realistic effect.

GOOD LUCK~

Drawing Human Figure

Human figure is indeed quite tricky as our body structure constantly changes as we move around. Research on human figures had been conducted since the Renaissance era, in which Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael had became the pioneers in drawing and sculpting human figures.

 Vitruvian Man; A drawing by Leonardo da Vinci which emphasizes on the proportion of a man.

The Statue of David by Micheangelo Buonarroti

A drawing of School of Athens by Raphael

I had circled three characters in the picture above. It might be interesting for you to note that the circled person from left: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

The method I used for training is by drawing human figures from newspapers, magazines, or other source of pictures. I will share the technique with you in the next post.

An Insight on Sociology

Yesterday, I went to Shah Alam the lake garden to draw. It is quite unbelievable as I found that there was hardly anything interesting to draw.

What I saw was a lot of people, some are with families, some with their loved ones, and some are jogging around. Then I look at the infrastructure, in which I can only see the playground, some small hut, tall buildings from the distance, and lots and lots of trees.

Then I decided to sit on a spot with less people and started to draw a tree which caught my attention.
As I was drawing, people are passing by, but there was this one Chinese woman; she looks messy, carrying three large bags in which I was quite sure containing plastic bottles and tin cans.

She stopped by, watching as I draw. She did not talk, but then she made a signal that she wants to take a look at my sketch book. I gave her my sketch book. She flips through it, as her dirty hands leaves stains on the pages, and  as she came into my self-portrait, she smiled and pointed at me, saying in Chinese "This is you." I understand a little bit of Chinese, but I cant talk with her as I can't speak Chinese and she can't speak Bahasa.

She handed back the sketch book, and after a little bow she went away.

This incident disturbed my thoughts.
I realized that languages could be a major communication barrier, but that does not happens with arts.

An Introduction

A close up picture of an ant; drawn based on a picture from a science magazine.

Drawing is the oldest form of art; a way of expressing thoughts and ideas. Even since the stone age, humans had been known to draw on the cave wall. At that particular time, their subject of art is limited only to the things they encountered in daily life, such as hunting and rituals.

 Prehistoric painting found in a cave in France

 depicting bulls

Ancient Egyptian drawings depicting jewelers at work.

It is interesting to note that the ancient Egyptians used special pigments derived from the soil as colours to their artwork. They were said to have contributed in inventing the sea-blue colour.