Working Out a New Painting Idea

I’ve been fighting with my computer the last couple of days on a problem getting it to boot properly, and that’s been getting me distracted from an idea I got a few days ago watching TC with a friend. There was some cop show on, and a scene showed a woman standing at a window in her kitchen. It caused me to flash back to an old photo of mine I took of a friend in profile that I had wanted to develop into a finished piece, but had set it aside and forgotten about it. I roughly laid out the composition I had in mind in this sketch.

I dug up the photo from my files (her name is Catharine,) and made a more detailed sketch of her. This will help me get familiar with the shapes and forms of her head. The hand is my own that I slimmed down some to make it look more feminine.

Now I guess I’ll get back to the computer problem. I need to get that out of the way so there won’t be any more distractions (I hope.)

New Sketch: Benched

This is taken from an old photo of mine. The fellow looked very forlorn for awhile, but I remember he got up suddenly as though he had been thinking long and hard on something, and then rushed off. I hope that whatever it was it all worked out.

Recent Pencil Portraits

Here are a few new portraits I’ve sketched. They’re taken from some low resolution video that I shot at a cafe and library in town. I had also given myself a task to draw them without doing any proportional measuring. Just go by sight alone. Some weren’t too successful, but these turned out okay.

I had spent a little time earlier in the day walking through a local museum, and had noticed how all the portraits there looked so unengaging. They often were so stagnantly posed with a distant stare that looked to be just objects rather than people. It wasn’t a new revelation, but something clear hit me about it at that time, driving me to do some sketching that showed people with a bit more personality revealed. This is why I like to use video. It tends to capture more expressions than I might get with a single photo.