Week 2 Expressive hands and portraits

The lesson today was on creating expressive hands and focus on drawing portraiture, it began by us dividing our A1 sheets into quarters

The first task was to draw Mels side profile in a silhouette, this activity wasn't to difficult and actually turned out pretty good. It really forces you to look at tiny details on the surface of her facial profile and also constantly making sure that the features of the face are in constant proportion with each other. If one feature is too large or small it really messes up the immersion of the profile

The second activity was the opposite of drawing a silhouette, for this one we had to draw the negative space. You really have to concentrate on drawing the space and shapes around Mels head, rather than simply 'drawing an outline'.

Next up was drawing a clenched fist, Mels hand was really good for this exercise as it was quite veiny and had a lot of texture to it which added a good amount of character to the drawing. I shaded the sides of the fingers to create a distinction between them, aiding in making the drawing look more realistic.

The finale of the four tasks was to draw the hands in a resting position, I really tried to use tonal values and line weight effectively here to create a three dimensional form within the hands.

We then moved on to a page of quick warm up face drawing, some blind drawn, some with continuous line and some with our non dominant drawing hand.

Here is a slightly more detailed warm up sketch

Here is a portrait of Mel really trying to use line effectively here to show three dimensionality within the image. I think it really shows on the nose area where the shading helped shape the nose greatly, I do have a bit of difficulty when it comes to drawing noses so this really helped.

The final task was to draw the hands and the face together in a image. The tonal contrast on the hands in comparison to the face help them in giving a quite real view in the drawing. The line work on the nose really came in effectively from my last drawing on to this one.