drawing portraits from life

#1

i’m interested in being able to draw portraits from life, not from photos, and actually being able to capture the likeness of the subject - i don’t want to be satisfied with just drawing a competent human face, it would be wonderful to be able to actually nail down that one individual out of all the 6 billion other individuals on the planet.

currently i go to life-drawing classes and try drawing portraits of the model there, but it’s not ideal for what i want, since everyone else is drawing the whole figure, not trying to capture the individual’s face. for instance, the model is 3 or 4 metres away, which is ok for drawing the figure but is too far away for me to see the details of the face, or he subtly looks around the room while posing, which doesn’t matter too much for everyone else in the class but is a bad thing for me.

what i’d really like is something like a 2 hour session of portrait drawing every week, so it’s hard to ask friends to pose as still as possible for that long regularly [plus, initially, the attempted drawings are so far off the mark that it’s very embarrassing/offensive to show them to the friend]. is there anyone else in the London / Hertfordshire area (in the UK) who’d be interested in getting together and hiring a model specifically for portrait drawing sessions?

[life models charge about £12/hour, so, for instance, if there were 4 of us, we could hire the model for 2 hours for £6 each]

if anyone’s interested, or if anyone has tried something similar and has any suggestions or pitfalls to avoid, please reply or PM me,
thanks.

#2

Hi,

I am very much a noob with no professional training so you want to countercheck what I say with your preferences and training.

I bought read and tried to understand (last part took longest) Anthony Ryder’s fantastic book about figure drawing.
His approach is very comprehensive, but he himself states that it takes time - not to practise it as such, but literally time to complete a drawing. He says he needs 20 or 30 hours to complete a full figure drawing.

So, in order to be able to practise without spending money and bothering any of my friends into repeated one hour sessions I did a self portrait the classical way with a mirror.

You can find that one in my portfolio.

As you are mainly interested in portraits the most reasonable thing to do is to get yourself a mirror and just start doing it. The mirror is very much unlike a photo as there is no translation to a 2D surface via a lense involved and your turning and twisting the head changes the horizon you see of the 3D form of your head just like with a hired model.

Oh, and get yourself that book. Recommendation. subliminal and all. You won’t remember this line…go and buy!

:smiley:

#3

thanks for that. i got that book a few weeks ago, i’m still reading through it - i don’t think i’ll end up doing 30 hour drawings though, i prefer the drawings of holbein and ingres, which are a sparser style.

#4

hi there,

yea, my first self portrait took “only” 12 around hours, so I know what you mean. But I consider it a sign of deepened understanding if you know how to keep yourself busy for that long a time and what to look for.

It basically puzzles me.

But besides that, the main point is the put-a-mirror-up-and-draw-yourself thing.

#5

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