Porttrait of Proportion

So now that I have "mastered" perspective, it is time to move on to proportion. My book uses portraiture for this lesson for two reasons: 1) they are perceived as more difficult, so doing one successfully builds confidence and 2) they effectively demonstrate how proportion can be easily misconstrued by a brain that sometimes overcompensates.

The second factor is actually a really interesting phenomenon. Apparently, because the top of the head is less interesting than the eyes, we see the eyes in a more prominent spot on the face. When beginning drawers draw a face, they mistakenly place the eyes 1/3 of the way down from the top of the head, even though the eyes are actually located half way. The result is what the author calls "cut off skull." One way to see proof of this overcompensation of how the brain "sees" proportion is to look in the mirror. Your head LOOKS the size that it is in actual space. However, if you take a marker and outline the image on the mirror and then measure it, the image of your head ON the mirror will be way smaller than the head you see IN the mirror.

To introductory lesson in portraiture is to copy (not trace) a portrait done by the master artist John Singer Sargent. The author believes that beginners can learn a lot by trying to draw like a master. She was right. On first glance, the portrait seems simple. I thought that it would be super easy to copy. However, the complexities are so subtle that you do not realize their genius until you get into it. Some of the lines are softer and broken while others are hard and solid. The lines are also very fluid, and the curvature so slight that it is easy to either make the curve too round or too straight, which really distorts the image. The author allows you to choose whether you copy the image right side up or upside down. I chose right side up because I thought it looked easy. Wrong.

I started and balled up my paper three times -- even though I was using my pane and grid as a guide. This is where I learned all of the great lessons about lines and subtle complexity, but it was nearly impossible to successfully recreate this portrait even remotely close to the original artist's work. So I started over one last time, but this time I recreated the image upside down. It did not turn out so great compared to the other image. However, if I had never seen the other image, and only seen mine, I would not have thought that mine was half bad.

Here is the original:


My girl's forehead is a little weird, but I kinda like it: