Portrait Practice - Blog Posts

circe-and-the-wolf

9 months ago

Portrait Practice - Work in progress (MG, obvs)

My summer goal is to try drawing portraits. Obviously, I’m also using this as an excuse important opportunity to stare at Matthew Goode.

I always hated drawing portraits but I love looking at them. I’d get so frustrated and usually ended up putting them in the bin or ruining the paper with rubbing out. Haven’t even tried one for many years. BUT drawing digitally has massively reduced my frustration levels as it’s so easy to make alterations, so 🤞 I can stick with this.

I’m finding two particular resources useful this week: Jake Spicer’s article in Artist and Illustrator Magazine (September issue), as well as his Insta feed, and ‘Portraits with Procreate’ by Melissa de Nobrega (which I bought with a gift voucher from my birthday 🎁).

I’d never really thought about tonal shapes before, so this is what I’m practising this week. Here are some progress shots (using layers on Procreate):

We’ve been joking about yellow filters 😂 but I actually might change the yellow. Not sure about it. Although it rocks with the mauves and dull pinks.

I used the grid method for the outlines and a tiny bit of tracing for the tricky parts. This is obviously cheating but my spatial awareness is shocking and I’m just having fun, so I’m cool with that.

I don’t want it to be in a realistic style (thankfully 😂) but I struggle with letting go and adopting a different style, even when drawing plants or animals. I think I’m a copier rather than a creative spirit when it comes to drawing. So we’ll see. I love Jake Spicer’s style. The benefit of Procreate is I’ll be able to experiment…

… and continue to stare at MG as Matthew Roydon (one of my favourite of his incarnations) 😍