1st Self Portrait

Post date: Jan 17, 2014 7:07:14 PM

It's the start of a new semester, and in Design 2 we're starting my favorite unit which is portraits. I take them through a couple different drawing methods and teach them how to accurately draw a portrait in graphite. We kind of spiral past the same concepts, and they get sick of shading in graphite but they get pretty good at it. This is the first thing they do, which is a quick twenty plus minute self portrait on sheets of bunk paper. They use the little propped mirrors then we then hang the pictures on the wall and talk about proper proportions and construction lines and such.

I get a kick out of walking them through basic corrections like eye height but I need to reconstruct my basic face proportions packet. Right now it's a borrowed one that's kind of confusing and doesn't quite go as in depth as I need it to. I wind up making most of my supplemental packets and materials from scratch in Illustrator and InDesign. Nothing out there is ever just what I need and I hate having to work around improper materials. The stuff I make always ends up needing adjustments anyways.

Keep in mind most of the examples under here are from freshmen/sophomore students. They also had a very strict and kinda brief time period, so these are the few that actually finished within that time limit. Most of the errors are incorrect proportions, lack of likeness or specificity, emphasis on the minutia over proper proportions, lack of dynamic line work or any line diversity, impartial representations, oversimplified representations or symbolic representations of things (cartoon eyes), and just general wtf-ness. The stage of artistic development my incoming students are at always astonishes me, most all of them are where they should be. But every now and then there's some portraits that make me do a double take. Overall though, this is my strongest set of classes I've had yet.