Today I’ve had my first lesson in portrait drawing from Corné Akkers (see former chapter).Of course there are libraries written full of theory but after a few basics I had to start drawing the portrait of an African woman.The most essential lessons were about proportions,working from outside in (first set up raw contours),don’t jump into details too fast,work with tone and tint,where tone is of the utmost importance to create difference of light and dark(contrast).In the end the picture “dictates” more or less the details after having worked on the essentials.Also seeing the curved lines relative toward our preferred orientation of straight horizontal and verical lines proves to be important.Last but not least we discussed the importance of composition and negative space.For instance when you try to draw a very tall buiding as a whole,you’ll get a lot of negative space relative to the tall buiding.Unless you want to fill that space,it is sometimes better to draw part of the object.

Working this way with a medium soft (B5) pencil and a lot of erasing,after thwo hours I produced a reasonable drawing.

‘If you teach me something.I’ll forget;if you show me something,maybe I’ll remember;if you make me do it,I’ll make it my own’

CONFUCIUS

See below an earlier attempt to sketch this portrait,not taking care very well of proportions,shades etc.and jumping into details too fast.

I am eager to learn,and above all,to practice a lot more!

During my second lesson,I choose the challenging task to draw a portrait of Magda,my wife. In the end it proved to be a complicated task because I worked 1:1 from a small photo,meaning that every small mistake matters and seems to be magnified.I started with the advice from Corne to try to divide the original photo into a simple geometry: in this case 1.5 squares did the job. Although the end result certainly was recognizable,for instance the mouth proved to be (very) wrong and needs more work.

I had to try Magda’s portrait again and am a little bit more pleased with the result.
This time I made the portrait a little larger and before adding some details I first applied Tone to the drawing