November 4, 2019
For my daily drawings in October I decided to continue drawing faces, but to increase the challenge a little. Before last June I had always shied away from drawing faces as I found it very intimidating. Last year and again in September, I used other artists’ work as my reference. This made it a little easier as the original drawings or paintings were already artistic interpretations and therefore once removed from realistic representations. The artist had already made decisions about what to keep in and what to leave out, etc. The fact that I could never reproduce the finished drawing or painting accurately didn’t bother me – I was happy if it looked like a face.
In October, it was a real challenge to turn to photographs as reference. Now I had to make my own decisions about how to simplify the visual information in the photos into a line drawing. I continued to use a dip pen and ink in order to avoid getting too precious. Of course, it meant that my accuracy is sacrificed, often resulting in uneven eyes and bizarre proportions – and I’m ok with that. Overall I am pretty pleased with my drawings in October. Some of them are even recognizable as SPECIFIC people.
In November I am leveling up again. This time I am working with photos, but I am going to begin in pencil and then build up both line and tone with a dip pen, a brush and ink washes. It’s all experimental and I’m working to come up with a process that works well for me and provides a result I’m happy with.
I’ve decided to redraw all of the same faces from October to make it a bit more interesting. So far it’s been fun to look at the two drawings of the same face side by side. I’m posting my drawings every day or so on Instagram and will post all of the drawings together in early December.
susanne semchuk 