One of my goals is to learn how to draw faces and portraits. It's a challenge to get proportions correct and placement of facial features. Ever since I took a two day workshop from Anne Bagby in 2004, I've collected photos of faces and practice drawing them occasionally.
When we sketch at coffee houses in the winter, I bring my little box of faces and practice drawing them. To see how my drawing compares to the original photo, I scan each into Photo Shop and over lay them to scale. The drawing is on the bottom and the photo on top with an opacity of 50%. 
Now I can observe both layers to see how they relate to one another.
This tells me I have to work on the placement and spacing of the eyes and mouths. With practice, these drawing will become more accurate.
3 comments:
This is a brilliant idea Paula! I admire you tackling challenges like this and working through them, and the practice is definitely showing!
You are one determined lady. This sounds very involved.
Practice is paying off, Paula. Good for you. In her book, Betty Edwards has an exercise that helps with the sort of thing you're doing. Turn your photo upside down and draw it upside down. Then turn around the results and stand back and applaud yourself. Of course this wouldn't help much with drawing actual people, other than that all drawing from a picture or figure informs what you do next.
I loved seeing your journals Wednesday. It's been fun to work this way.
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