Portrait Night 12/13 (Tilda Swinton)

So, for this week’s #PortraitNight drawing, instead of just breaking out the sketchbook and drawing someone, I decided to subject myself to a taste of my own medicine and do a caricature exercise I occasionally make my students do when I teach comics classes. The exercise is one of Ted Stearn’s (of Fuzz and Pluck fame) and you can find it here. Since I was working from a picture rather than a live subject, I had to modify the exercise slightly, but I kept with the general spirit of things.

I started with two blind contour drawings, followed by one opposite hand drawing. I hesitated to even scan this since the point of these sorts of exercises has absolutely nothing to do with what winds up on your page–It’s entirely about forcing yourself to really, really look at what’s in front of you rather than drawing what you think something “should” look like. (See the great Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain for a lot more on that.) It’s also a great way to familiarize yourself with your subject. I imagine my finger tracing around the subject’s face as my pencil moves. Anyway, here’s the result of that. (Since the drawing itself is inconsequential, I just drew each right on top of the other.)

Then, as per the exercise, I studied the photo I was working from and made a list of what I thought the most prominent features were. Here’s the picture I was working from and my list (which you can see in my usual chicken-scratch at the top left of that sketchbook page above):

Features:

• small mouth
• “beaked” mouth
• big doe-ish eyes
• round chin
• big ears
• prominent cheekbones
• eyeline low?
• angular jaw

The main drawing part of the exercise involves then drawing two (or more) iterations of the subject, pushing the exaggeration further and further with each successive drawing. Like the warmup exercises, these are timed. I, though, gave myself some extra time with each since I wanted a more polished finished image than the proscribed five minutes would have allowed; I gave myself fifteen minutes for each. Here’s the first iteration:

Not terrible–I’ve certainly done worse for Portrait Night–but not great either. With the next iteration, though, the idea is to push the exaggeration and abstraction further. So here’s the final image (I inked/colored it later, but the underlying pencil drawing was done in the allotted fifteen minutes):

I’m actually reasonably happy with this one. I wish I had time each week to do this whole exercise for each Portrait Night. I don’t… but I’ll definitely have a go with it again at some point.

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If you’d like to suggest a #PortraitNight subject, you can do so either via the comments section here, or via my Twitter.