artamaze by Katherine Hilden

Drawing Michelangelo’s David

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anatomy, David, face, heroism, idealized, Michelangelo, parody, plaster cast, Wilmette Public Library on June 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The Wilmette Public Library has a life-size replica of David’s head. It was a gift to the library some years ago and then the library didn’t know what to do with it. Who knew!? Well, very few people. It’s in an acrylic case, in the basement, behind the elevator.
What a treasure! Anybody can go behind the elevator with a drawing pad and a pencil, pull up a chair and treat her-himself to a couple of hours of studying that head. I took my drawing class there recently. Drawing from plaster casts was standard practice in art schools through the 19th century and well into the 20th. I can’t think of a better way to study the anatomy of a face. Look at the eyes, for example, you can clearly see how the eyelids wrap around the sphere of the eyeball.
Of course, Michelangelo’s David is an idealized, heroic figure. The fate of all heroism in our age is parody. I have my own mild caricature of dear old David, from about thirteen years ago.

For a few more, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syVGfnuDXDE
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
http://www.khilden.com
http://facefame.wordpress.com
http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com
http://www.katherinehilden.com

That Paper Bag

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Failed Effort, literalness, Seeing, Still life, Technique and Demo, tagged crinkles, face, Karen, Paper Bag on February 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Draw. Draw anytime. Draw anything. There’s always something lying around that begs to be drawn. A paper bag, for example. I recommend that students practice and here’s an example of a motivated student, Karen Gerrard, producing a fine drawing at home of, what else, an inspiring paper bag. It probably was a little more wrinkled than the drawing shows, but she simplified the planes to great effect.

Better than the drawing I did during class. A face kept coming out and I ended up shading the right side of the bag to obscure the grimace. Happens all the time with inanimate objects—oh, look, there’s a face. Once you see it, you can’t not see it. Drawing is always an adventure, full of unexpected turns and–crinkles. Simplify, simplify!

www.katherinehilden.com

Crop that Face, I Dare You

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Cropping, faces, Illustration, literalness, Technique and Demo, Texture, tagged Alejandra, beauty, contour, cropping, expressiveness, face, Juan de Pareja, texture, Velazquez on May 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I promise, we’ll move on to other topics besides cropping, but the power of cropping cannot be underestimated.

This face was one of four studies on the same page. The model was a magazine add with strong shadows, selling jewelry of all things. In setting up the exercise, I stressed that we were not after a likeness of this beautiful woman, but were using her as a point of departure for expressive studies of the face. We already know that beauty and expressiveness are incompatible, a major thread in these conversations.

The page as a whole did not work because the faces were too similarly drawn and were all the same size. What to do? CROP! You can see the edges of the strips of paper we used in cropping. The result is an expressive face.

But wait, there’s more. What if we crop even more radically! What if we slice the image through the eye on the right edge. That’s the image at the top of this post. It’s far removed from literalness, from illustration. Now we have a provocative image. It’s truly an image, in the sense that it is more than what it represents.

Let me point out just three things that make this image so rich.

*The left half of the page is all texture.

*The contour of the face is varied, so that as we trace it we travel over three different “landscapes.”

* One eye is in the middle of the page. Uncanny! There’s a study of this phenomenon (I can’t remember the author’s name now) that shows that portrait artists will compose their subject in such a way that one eye of the sitter is in the middle of the canvas.

—————————————————————— Velazquez(1599-1663), Portrait of Juan de Pareja

Twenty Minutes to Turn Your Head Around

Posted in Achievement, faces, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged aha-moment, contrapposto, demo, face, figure, hand, Jackie on November 5, 2012| 2 Comments »

In my drawing class I like to sit next to students and draw along. Well, first I ask for permission because sometimes people just want to noodle by themselves. When they invite me in, I sometimes draw quietly, but most of the time there are questions and then I comment on what I’m doing, what to look for, how to connect this and that, etc.

I recently worked with Jackie, a new student, who was drawing from a magazine photo of a standing figure. Without further comment, I’ll just let the “before” and “after” speak for themselves.

When I’m drawing, I lose all sense of time. I think we worked together for about twenty minutes. That is to say, I drew and demonstrated how to approach the figure, how to put the contrapposto lines down first, why leaving the head to last is a good idea (so counter-intuitive!), how to put in the T-face, do side studies of hands, see the V-shape in the hand, see the plumb line between the neck and the heel to make the figure stand convincingly…stuff like that. Doesn’t take long.

After my tutorial, she produced a much-improved drawing and brushed her “before” drawing aside. “So much better,” she said. Reflecting on her former teachers, she added, “I have to tell you, all art teachers are not created equal.”

Somebody had an aha-moment.

Perspective, Profile, Bottle and Glasses

Posted in faces, Illustration, Still life, Technique and Demo, tagged add on paper, drama, exaggerate, face, glasses, goffy, perception, perspective, profile, spray bottle on October 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

What the!

Yes, it’s a spray bottle wearing a pair of glasses.

I get paid for thinking up stuff like this.

Let me explain. This exercise combines two topics: perspective and profile. In the previous class we had worked on the topic of perspective. Nothing elaborate, just one-point and two-point perspective, using architectural images to find the vanishing points. For our purposes in this drawing class, perspective is not crucial, but it’s a useful tool. It comes in handy, for example, when you draw a face in three-quarter view. The eye farther away from the viewer (the one behind the bridge of the nose) will be smaller than the eye closer to you. That farther-away eye is tricky to draw, so we didn’t even go there. It’s enough to just get the point of diminished size. And to get that across, I set a pair of glasses on a spray bottle, one combo for each student.

Notice, that the perspective in the glasses is exaggerated in these drawings, according to my instruction. Students are universally reluctant to exaggerate anything for the simple reason that they want to draw what they see. Fine. But to add drama and to make a point, you need to summon the courage to exaggerate. Add that to the lesson in perspective and profile.

All in all, a profitable class. Initially, eyebrows were raised at the goofy sight of spray bottles wearing glasses. Then followed the challenge of getting all the elements together, representationally and technically. The motif only works if the drawing technique is fairly precise and the object is shown matter-of-factly and in its entirety. This is why one student found it necessary to add a strip of paper at the bottom of her initial sheet. A fourth lesson learned: it’s ok to do this, if you run out of paper, just tape on an addition.

I have since learned that one of these drawings has been framed and hung in a law office.

Do this at home: grab a spray bottle, put your glasses on it, reflect on the complexity of reading a face. See? Not goofy at all.

(To enlarge, click on image.)

Drawing from Nacho Duato Ballet

Posted in Dance and Theater, Life drawing, tagged ballet, drawing, face, gesture, Nacho Duato, YouTube on December 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

There’s nothing like drawing from a live model. It’s inspiring and invigorating and you can see the forms clearly. In a pinch, if you feel the urge to draw but can’t get anyone to pose for you (good luck trying to find someone who’s willing and able to sit still these days), you can draw from photos. But photos are so 20^th century.

Instead, I recommend that you draw from YouTube. Name a person, a topic, or an event, and you’ll find it on YouTube. If you want to practice drawing faces, pick one of the thousands of clips of talking heads. Run the video and decide which angle you’ll draw. Stop the frame. Voila. Your model is sitting for you. If you’re in the mood for gesture drawing, find a sport or a ballet. Stop the frame. You can be sure, no model would ever hold these poses. You will get a work out, guaranteed.

Above, a page of studies after a ballet by Nacho Duato, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkC0hHat_ik

Life Drawing: Neck Meets Jaw

Posted in faces, Life drawing, Technique and Demo, tagged face, jaw, life drawing, neck on March 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The discussion in the previous post (2.8.11) finds ample illustrations in “real life.”

Here are some of my own life drawings that show the model displaying the neck-meets-jaw angle. Notice that this requires a foreshortening of the face, with the chin being prominent; the nose seen as a triangle (from underneath); the bridge of the nose very short; the eye, a mere arc; and the forehead losing all of its real height, because it is the farthest section away from the eye of the artist; oh, and the hair on the top of the head barely makes an appearance.

Pulling this off takes practice, both in seeing and in drawing. Errmm–has anybody noticed!– that’s the theme running through these posts on technique. Practice!

(The drawing at the top consists of five three-minute drawings. The standing pose, above, is a ten-minute drawing. The seated pose, left, is a fifteen-minute pose.)

Neck Meets Jaw

Posted in faces, Life drawing, Technique and Demo, tagged face, foreshortening, jaw, neck on March 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

We like drawing the face looking straight at us. It’s easy that way because all the features are aligned symmetrically so that as we draw, we can orient ourselves without getting lost. But a full frontal view is limited in its expressive possibilities. We all know from our everyday interactions with people that people tilt their heads as they speak and look at things and that a little tilt conveys attitude and emotional meaning. Those of us who are privileged enough to participate in life drawing know something else: the model stands on an elevation and as we draw her/him we look up at the face, seeing the jaw from underneath. When the model reclines or twists, we also see the face and neck from this foreshortened angle. That angle is quite beautiful, if I may use that old-fashioned word, but also quite challenging, because it presents us with both subtlety and at the same time a definite anatomical geometry. To avoid the issue, students tend to just ignore what’s in front of their eyes and instead draw a full frontal , standard-issue face. That makes for a sad drawing.

It was time to face the underside of the face, where the neck meets the jaw. My presentation started with a face on a lampshade. As we tilt the lampshade back, we see the underside of the nose, which becomes triangular, and the underside of the lampshade, which becomes an ellipse. The stem of the lampshade is now roughly in the middle of the ellipse. We rotate the face to the left and move the stem to the right, and, voila, the analogy to head-with-neck becomes obvious. An aha! -moment for all students. The demo was clear, but it turned out to be a little harder to put into practice. But by now we know, don’t we, that practice is the thing! The muscle that wraps around the neck-tube, extending from the back of the ear to the sternum in front, is called the sternocleidomastoid. A fun word to stay, but a bear to draw. So—surprise, ha—the neck is not exactly the simple stem of a lampshade, but seeing the analogy does help you visualize what’s going on.

Practice!

THOSE GNARLY ROMANS

Posted in faces, tagged cahracter, face, Romans, still life on August 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Stripped of their make-up, the Romans come at us with in-your-face character. Colorless, and therefore, all the more colorful! And best of all, no eye-lashes!

In the best of worlds, I would be able to whisk my class off to New York at a whim so that we could draw the Met’s marvelous collection of Roman portrait heads. While the Greeks inclined toward youthful and athletic idealization, the Romans were interested in depth of character, individuality and the wisdom of age. That’s one reason they make great subjects for drawing. Another is that the heads are all white, uniform in color, and therefore we see pure shapes without being distracted by topical color. These ancient sculptures, as well as ancient Greek and Roman buildings, were originally painted in bright colors (a subject for a future post) but after a couple of millennia of weather and neglect, the color has worn off, leaving us with pure form. Perfect for drawing!

Because we can’t seem to come up with the funds (millions) to purchase original Roman busts, we make do with photos. It’s not ideal, but the photo has a number of advantages: the light never changes and the instructor and the student look at exactly the same form. The forms that make up the face are always round and rendering a three-dimensional round form in a two-dimensional medium calls for careful observation and a subtle drawing technique. This is not an easy assignment. These heads are essentially a variation on the old pottery-and-drapery still life, but here we have the added dimension of emotional mystery. Emotional content acts as fuel in a drawing assignment. It keeps you going as you navigate over the ridges and spheres of the face. Students find these faces inspiring, it seems, because the work they produce is impressive.

The Met: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/12.23

Drawings by Laura F., Spike S., Vera C., and Sarah R. (working from Michelangelo’s Medici portrait).