The non plus ultra of drawing is the face. Well, maybe not of Drawing writ large, but almost certainly of drawing students. They approach the face more ferociously than anything else. It has a way of talking back, you know.
Western Art is full of beautiful faces, meaning idealized faces. It’s hard for us not to be haunted by them: from the Venus de Milo to Botticelli’s Venus to Raphael’s insipid Madonnas to Michelangelo’s pouting Madonnas to Sargent’s 
gossamer heiresses. In the 19th century women started looking more interesting. Think of Degas and Manet.
Imagine my delight at finding ads for Céline products (handbags, though you’d never guess) where young women, having left the house without running fingers through their shapeless hair and without bothering about makeup, scowl at us. Take that! Now draw me and don’t make me pretty.
In this drawing by Maggy Shell, notice how powerful the eyes are even though no anatomy is indicated. No eyelid, no iris. 
This face & head study goes deeper than mere anatomy. You understand the anatomy without seeing the face anatomically. Instead, what intrigues you is the expression. With an uncanny economy of means the artist draws us into the mystery behind the face.
Maggy Shell, Céline Frown, charcoal on paper, ~16” x 14”
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
line. (Fumo in Italian means smoke.) Sfumato eliminates the line as a way of distinguishing one thing from another. It means that everything is related to everything around it and the eye flows through the image and sees interrelatedness on the canvas as it does in real life. This is huge. It makes the image life-like and I would go so far as to call it a consciousness-raising technique.
continuous black line. High school students love Botticelli but when we mature a bit, we embrace Leonardo’s idea more and more. Sfumato. It’s not that smoke gets in your eyes, it’s that the adult perception of reality grapples with interrelatedness—conceptually much richer and technically much more difficult.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 