I can’t help it: I am obsessed with drawing faces. I think a convincing likeness is the hardest thing in the world to draw. This is well-trodden ground: our brains are specifically wired for face recognition, for obvious survival reasons, and so we notice tiny, tiny differences in faces that we wouldn’t notice anywhere else so that we can recognize each other. This makes faces harder to draw than anything, because although they may not be intrinsically more complicated than anything else – it’s all just light and shadow, right? No matter what you’re drawing? – we do notice the tiniest of errors, where you can get away with murder on a flower and nobody will notice. I’ve absolutely destroyed likenesses by making practically imperceptible changes to eyes or lips. It’s uncanny.
It’s hard enough to draw a face straight-on and get a good likeness, but throw it on an angle and it gets almost murderously hard. I’m now convinced that there’s nothing harder to draw than a distinct likeness, at an angle. Mentally, we (or at least I) try to straighten things out, consciously or unconsciously, and we end up loading our own perception of what we’re looking at into the drawing, and all that.
This is why many people – most, perhaps, but that’s another discussion – turn to various methods to help accuracy when doing portraits; grids, projections, even flat-out tracing or painting directly on photos. I’m not taking up that question now other than to state that I’ve learned a lot about professional working methods recently, even going back to the renaissance, and virtually every artist you’ve ever heard of relied on and used one or more of these methods for much of their work. I’ve used grids on quite a few of my portraits, especially when there was a time constraint involved and it was more an exercise in production rather than academic purity. Still, though, one of my favorite non-study things to do is to find a random photo on the internet that I find appealing, bust out the sketchbook, and try to draw it, freehand, as well as I can. When I say ‘favorite,” it should be broadly interpreted. More often than not it’s maddeningly frustrating and very painful, because it’s very, very hard.
I got a bit of a surprise recently when I decided to check a couple of recent doodles against their photo sources to see how close I got. I learned very early on not to do this, because the results are usually staggering and painful. How could I have missed by THAT MUCH? Still, I was curious. So here’s a photo I drew from; I then scanned the drawing, scaled it to the same size as best I could, and overlaid them in Photoshop to see how close I got. I was very surprised to see that I was a lot closer than I expected to be, and had been the last time I checked. I checked a couple of other recent ones after this and was again surprised to see that I was really quite close.
From this, it’s easy to see that a lot more goes into a likeness than just correct forms, and this was probably a 20-minute sketch, not a full-on effort at a portrait. There would obviously be plenty more to do to develop this into a “piece.” The biggest mistake is the placement of her left eye, which was too low, putting her eyes at too severe an angle. This in itself is noteworthy for me because I usually err in the other direction, in flattening things out that aren’t flat. So in a way, I’m almost encouraged by that; maybe I’m overcorrecting for a tendency I know I have and now I just need to reel it back a little. But the shape of the face, the size and placement of the features (with the exception of the right eye and brow) were really pretty close to spot-on here. Close enough that if the eye was moved, this could be the basis of a more extensive portrait and probably have a good shot at coming out pretty well, and could have moved next into values, and then planes and rendering.
I guess the moral of the story is: you really can get better at this if you just keep doing it and keep really, really trying to get it right. The other ones I checked were even closer than this one was. The Famous Artists Course says “you learn to draw by drawing.” It’s taken a good five years, but I’m starting to see that that’s right.
Catherine O’Hara as Mickey, right?
Yes indeed! You’re clearly a man of taste. :)
(Everyone here who doesn’t love Catherine O’Hara, raise your hands. Now: leave. What the hell is wrong with you? What’s not to love?)
She deserves a much better portrait than my hasty scribble here. I’ll come back to it.
Actually I’ve only seen bits of “A Mighty Wind”, but I’d recognize that chin anywhere, and the autoharp was the giveaway as to which character she was playing.
The Famous Artists Course says “you learn to draw by drawing.”
I’d like to amend that with “you don’t learn from doing things correctly.” Keep drawing!