The purpose behind this book is to encourage you and help you create a continually growing body of rough sketches that you can use and reuse in your artwork. The face-mapping technique I use is easy to remember and allows you to draw a face anywhere, anytime, without needing a photo in front of you. You can draw faces from your imagination with a focus on creating a stylized look that is all your own.
Chapter 2 focuses on proportion. You’ll see how this simple face mapping works and create some face maps of your own to practice sketching from. We’ll discuss different angles of the head, head mass, face planes and more. You can also try your hand at the face details with some mini-demos showing easy ways to create each of the facial features using simple shapes or easy-to-remember tricks.
As you move on to Chapter 3, you will be guided through different ways you can bend the face mapping “rules” to create more stylized faces. This is where Pursuing Portraits becomes really fun! As you continue to create rough sketches, you’ll begin to see growth in your own work, and, best of all, you’ll create a body of work to pull from for the projects in Chapter 5.
In Chapter 4 you’ll explore the color wheel, using a variety of mediums to create portrait palettes. This will get your own wheels turning as you begin to see the possibilities for future mixed-media projects with both ordinary and extraordinary color palettes and mediums.
Sprinkled throughout the book, well-known artists as well as a couple of outstanding students from my workshops will share their own portrait styles and answer questions about their pursuit of portraits to give you insight into their own personal journey. Their work is inspiring and will give you a broad range of styles to learn from. Look for the “Artists Share” pages to be inspired by their portraits and to learn about their experiences.
Chapter 5 is loaded with stepped-out mixed-media projects, where you can use your favorite sketches from Chapters 2 and 3 as the starting place. After all, this is the point of this book: Sketching daily is not an exercise unto itself; it is the basic foundation of painting and creating faces in your art.
Here’s a glimpse inside my sketchbook. Sometimes I concentrate on drawing a complete face, and other times I’ll focus on one feature.