Amanda Portrait
Continuing the quick pencil portraits, my friend Amanda.
Tag: portrait
Diane
This was a challenge. It’s hard enough drawing friends, but drawing a friend when asked by her partner of many years – knowing exactly how her smile looks and squint of the eyes, every facial expression. How does one capture all of that faithfully?
Pencil and conté crayon on paper.
Portrait of actress Ida Gyllensten
Being a fan of 50s/60s kitsch art, have been playing with a contemporary way to create this type of art featuring modern iconic people. Some famous, some not. This is Ida Gyllensten, actress and singer. Drawn in pencil and crayon.
Ida is a friend from wild days in London in the mid-noughties.
Ida is a phenomenal actress. The Guardian said of Ida’s Magdalena in Scandi Noir ‘End of Summer’:
Magdalena is overly protective of her youngest son and cruelly dismisses her daughter. Some of those flashback scenes are beautifully dream-like, before they dissolve into nightmares.
It’s currently on BBC iPlayer.
https://idagyllensten.se/english
https://dreamingofislands1.bandcamp.com/album/dreaming-of-islands
Lana Del Ray
Being a fan of 50s/60s kitsch art, have been playing with a contemporary way to create this type of art featuring modern iconic people. Some famous, some not. More to come.
Drawn in pencil and crayon.
Violent Violet
Literally just doodling with Procreate ‘lightsabers’ as I call them. It turned out with a pretty good likeness of the cat, so posting it here.
Moose never would’ve hurt her
Charlotte Rampling as Velma in Farewell My Lovely.
Hayley Atwell portrait
I’ve used photos as reference, obviously – I don’t have Hayley Atwell on speed dial.
I’ve been finding my portrait drawings not being as good as I want. It’s good to practice things like hands too, but I’m going back to basics with faces and heads. I’ve been studying how favourite artists approach the head. This includes Loomis method – an idealised way used for commercial and comic art. It’s quite magical following this method and seeing pretty accurate 3D heads and faces appear very quickly. Even better, it can be used for real people, to set up a life drawing or portrait sitting quickly and getting a face likeness.
Anyway, I realised I don’t have a systematic way to do portraits and generally just battle with the paint until the face looks OK. Starting fresh, I’m learning about approaches to structure, and in this example, working skin tones. It’s not my best portrait, but I was mainly following a skin tones technique tutorial. I find it useful to practice from well known people as you can find a range of images from different angles to help with understanding the 3D aspects of the face. This is ALWAYS second best to a real life sitting, but good enough for practice.
Christopher Walken
None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought. Eat the delicious food, walk in the sunshine, jump in the ocean. Say the truth you are carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly, be kind, be weird–there’s no time for anything else.
Might’ve been him, might not. I like to think so, though 🙂