Studies of Head Drawing in Charcoal and Graphite

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 me. However, the problem is if the mouth is moving, it's hard to draw the mouth, the jaw, and the lower half of the face respectfully. I can't get that resonance of character as accurately as I would ideally like. Capturing the likeness of the model comes through noticing the direction of the light, getting the proportions right, and using your medium to apply sensitive and poignant marks.

The drawing above is your basic sketch of some facial features. The nose is in charcoal, and the sphere study on the left shows the shadow on the lower left side of the sphere. I always try to think of how light if coming from one direction falls onto someone's face, forehead, nose, etc. The nose is often spherical in nature. The cast shadow of the nose falls onto the face. The form shadow of the nose's central sphere is sensitive to the changing planes of the nostril wall to the left. Because it's largely cartilage, the nose's definition is usually soft, and if I may pontificate, the phenomenon of this beautiful form can often be depicted in a few sure-footed strokes.

Here is a quick charcoal drawing of Bob. I drew it in July 2014. Bob was fun to draw because he sat very still. His eyes, hair, nose, and beard had a lot of character similar to a sailor long retired from days spend thrashing around in a boat. I had a particularly enjoyable time with his nose. I didn't want to delineate the bridge of the nose with the far left cheek bone or the nose would come across as too harsh and not wholly belonging to the entity of his face. Chuck Close, the great American portrait and landscape painter, once said, "I am interested in the richness and complexity of the portrait head (the skin, pores, individual hairs, reflections all presented) coupled with an equally extreme attitude of economy and simplicity in the working methods." (179) I find his quote to be similar to my own ideals: the character of the person should emerge from the portrait aided by the exploitation of the medium. 

I liked using limited amount of marks to attain both likeness and flattering aspects of the individual's head. Any drawing or painting medium proves interesting to me. For the past two summers I have used colored pencils (Prismacolor) for some head drawings or paintings, dark browns and black watercolor for others, and charcoal. 

This is another Bob drawing, done on the same day as the one mentioned above. I used a few different varieties of black charcoal for his portrait (soft, medium, a hard to do some rough starts). I used charcoal pencil and vine charcoal. Vine came first. This was my warm up study of him.  

This sitter's name is Ben. I used burnt umber and black watercolor on toned tan Strathmore 80 pound paper. It is 9x12 in. in size. He was a young man, around the age of 32, and he sat very still. This portrait was revealing to me partly because I always struggle with trying to get the neck right on people. With the right brush, you can get the hairline, eyebrows, eyes, bottom of the nose, top lip, shadow under lower lip without too much trouble. But the neck's complication comes from the shadow cast from the jaw as it falls on the neck and combines with the neck's own form shadow; I think it is just hard to get. It's difficult to capture in swift and powerful charcoal, it's difficult to show in lovely graphite, and a real pain in the ass in watercolor with its somewhat unpredictable termination points. Luckily for me, as I was transmitting the neck and its shadows on the page, the paper buckled just at where the vertebrae and muscles were, and it automatically captured the form of his neck. The paper contortions forced the paint to dry this way, and I couldn't have been happier. Sometimes I really like painting on light-weight paper (somewhat flimsy) for these reasons.

Back to charcoal. I really like how dark and textural it can be. You can see the square around her head to some degree. This woman was a bit older, and sadly I wasn't able to get her name, but she sat so wonderfully still. I tried to get the plane changes of her face, and while some of the cheek looks clumsy and heavy, I realized how the face as one stares at it becomes abstract, and how all realistic depictions are partially abstract. The same can be said for abstract art being realistic- I look at abstract expressionism and think some of the surface resembles microscope close-ups.  This point was made clear by Kandinsky in one of his essays I read a while back ("abstraction is realism and realism is abstraction").

This last one is a quick graphite pencil study of Richard, who sat for the class. I used the only pencil I had on my person at the time, which was a 'Just Basics' #2. The big and dirty side of my palm sullied the right hand side of the image; I almost got away with it as it left a form shadow on the right side of his face. 

If I were to say one more thing about making a head drawing live and in person, I would say having a single light source makes things a lot easier. The drafts-person is then able to notice where the plane breaks are without too much trouble (forehead planes, eye socket and ear concavities, the muzzle of the mouth, where the chin drops off, etc). 

In the future I would like to draw more of my friends and loved ones. Won't you sit for me someday? 

Works Cited

Brown, Clint. Artist to Artist. Corvallis: Jackson Creek Press. 1998. Book.