Well I'm really enjoying Nelleke's class this week. It's been really fun.
She's so funny and interesting and all the different - sort of different techniques
that she's using are very inspiring and you know they just make me want to try
all different kinds of things. To step out of my comfort zone and to play as
she suggests. So I'm gonna get to work and start making some faces. I don't have
any magazines at home but I have a big collection of these ancient yearbooks.
I've bought them at a flea markets over the years. And what I love about them is
you have all these different faces. People try and look their best for their
pictures you know and there are different eras but they're all kind of
posed in the same way and they're great for drawing and for just studying
characters and faces. If you ever come across one of these things in a flea
market or an attic, pull them out and try drawing some of these faces inside.
They're really really very cool and sweet and evocative of other times.
Another cool resource are old mug shots. This is a big book full of all different
kinds of ones and I love these pictures because they capture you know this kind
of moment of these real types. Criminals with they've been busted. Goons and thugs
and you can find these kinds of pictures on the internet if you just google mug
shots. And so I'm gonna Xerox a few pages out of that book and I have some
faces that we can work with. This is a moleskin that I've filled just with
these kinds of drawings of corporate executives, criminals, yearbook dudes
thugs of different kinds, and I do watercolors and study them. Monkeys even!
This is a project I began called men in white shirts. It's an entire book
full of well, drawings of men in white shirts. Different kinds and I try to vary
my style and the techniques that I use in every one. It's sort of a place to
experiment, to try stuff out and to fool around and so I think that Nelleke's
assignment will be a really great way to extend this.
So I think I'm going to combine my drawings of goons from mug shots with
this project of men in white shirts on gray paper drawn with black lines. It's
fun to have a project like this. Just kind of come back to it, I mean I never
spend more than like a few minutes doing any one of these and some of them are
from my imagination, from magazines, from pictures on the internet whatever.
There's endless resources to draw on and to see you know where you go with it. So
let's start. So I'm gonna start with this criminal dude from Davenport Iowa and
I'll start by throwing a kind of a general contour of the outer edges of his head
and his hat and stuff like that with a big fat marker and now his eyes you know
they have that criminal hooded look a little bit of a nose the stache
all-important his shirt and tie of course and now I go in with a finer pen
and I'm just adding some shading or some texture a little bit of hatching to
give him some dimension and tightening things up and now I take out my bombay
white ink I'd love to use white ink against tonal paper and I'm just using a
regular watercolor brush so it's water-based ink and I'm also of course
doing a shirt, now the irises and the whites of his eyes to just make it pop a
little bit. And I'm gonna add a little feather to his cap. Why not? Just give
him a bit of panache and some highlights and now I'm gonna paint in the
background I just want to make him stand out from the background by slathering on
some white paint and because I slathered I now go back in with my pen and just
fill in the details that are obscured with my white paint. All right looking
sharp! It's criminal dude number one. This next guy I'm gonna try the collage
technique that Nelleke uses but my own version of that. Here's another
criminal dude I'm gonna cut his face right in half and I'm gonna take the top
half put it on my page and now I'm gonna use that as inspiration to draw the rest
of him. What does he look like now that I've lost the bottom part of his face. Some lips and a
big lantern jaw. Of course he's a criminal so you know he's gonna need a
little cleft in his chin and some big hulking shoulders and of course five
o'clock shadow. Draw that in. A little pencil line mustache, a bowtie! Why not?
Mix things up a bit and you know one of those old kinds of suits with wide width
lapels, pinstripes of course, and a snazzy waistcoat with checkers and let's color in that
bowtie. Right now I'm gonna take that away and now I'm gonna draw the rest of
him using the bottom part as inspiration. A nice cauliflower ear and little bit of
thinning on top but of course he has those super cool sideburns and I'm gonna
give him some glasses to make him look a bit more forbidding, some hairy eyebrows,
a thin evil looking nose and I'm gonna give him dark glasses because that makes
him more inscrutable and threatening looking and now of course the old Bombay
white ink, gotta give him the white shirt and I'm also gonna put some highlights on
those glasses to show them reflecting and of course his nose. And alright.
there he is! Super cool scary-looking thuggish dude number two. Well this is
just the beginning of the week, you know I plan to keep drawing, keep making faces
all week long as Nelleke suggests and to fill up my book with all kinds of
fun stuff. Hope you are too!