Week 5 of Portrait Art Classes

We were concentrating on negative space this week- what do the shapes of the background meeting the model make? If you’re not used to doing this it can be tricky at first, the brain is an amazing thing and it will constantly try to put things together for you so that you do not notice the negative space so you have to really fight against it to see. A technique that helped was holding up a flat coloured piece of paper behind the area that we wanted to see the negative space and this helped reduce the amount of other stimuli so that you could focus on just that negative space. Then it was thinking about the different shapes that made up that negative space (for example a sharp triangle stacked on top of a rectangle or a semi circle next to a square) and then translating this shape onto your drawing.

I also decided to try adding colour this week. I decided to start with a green base layer to help the skin tones appear more natural (desaturating the colours layered on top). This was a mistake, my paper was not textured enough to take that many layers of pastel and so by the time I added all the tonal values using the green and went onto add the skin colours it was not really taking any more pastel so I was just left with an off looking Elphaba from Wicked!

I need to try again, this time with a paper that has more tooth to it!

Next week we will be looking at different materials so we were encouraged to bring along something that we wanted to try but perhaps had not previously used out of fear or not having the right project or had been “saving for good”!