Last Month

In February, I worked on portraits as a project and mostly I worked through a Skchy Art School class about the Loomis method. It was taught by Mike Creighton.  He did a good job of showing and explaining this method in the videos.  I still need to watch the last one which is a beginning to end frontal view portrait and also to watch 3 of the live Q&As which were filmed when the class first dropped in August of 2020. 

I've found that I really don't like sitting and watching videos but I am coming to terms with the fact that it is a good way to learn, especially during a pandemic.  Most days, I split my project time about 50% watching/learning and 50% doing. 

Here is a portrait of a Sktchy muse (that's what they call them) at the beginning of the month before I started to watch the videos. 

Here is the same muse at the end of the month.  I didn't even remember the sketch from the beginning of the month until I started to document and do my month-end evaluation.  If I had planned, I would have waited and gone through the 3rd to last lesson, which was a full run through of the profile view.  Even so, I think the proportions improved a lot from the beginning of the month. 

Part of the resemblance issue is getting someone to look the right age.  In both of these, she looks older than she is. I'm not that hung up on resemblance at this point, especially since I am discovering that I really need to slow down to truly see actual facial features.  After that, it's the issue of trying to get the right shapes and angles and when you are trying to capture the exact shape of an eye or how lips some together in the corner it's a lot of tiny details.  

In March, I am going to continue to work on portraits.  I want to finish Mike's class and start to use some of the other resources that I found.