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Showing posts from August, 2014

Studies of Head Drawing in Charcoal and Graphite

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I first started really enjoying the process of drawing heads when I was in high school. Our art teacher, Mrs. Menninghaus, made us simply draw the head and some of the neck of a fellow classmate for an in-class exercise. I think I used a pencil in medium softness. I drew a girl named Keely. Keely Downes. I realized as I was drawing her that her upper lip had a protrusion that dipped down onto the middle part of her bottom lip. Getting that subtlety with the pencil made the mouth look so much more convincing. After Keely, some of my friends wanted me to draw them, and some of them came out looking pretty good. The Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones once said the fastest way to lose a friend is to draw a picture of them. Luckily none of my friends have ever stopped talking to me because of a poor drawing I did of them. It's hard to draw some people from real life though, especially if they are your friends; I always feel the impulse to talk with them while they are sitting in front of