How To Make A Portrait – Girl, Dog Or Fish

My younger daughter Liv came home to Galway to spend Easter weekend with her parents and the dog. Liv and I are blessed, in that we can watch hours of trash TV without getting tired. Neither do we worry about being judged by those with more sophisticated taste who might happen to walk past, as there are two of us, and one of him, and I suspect the little terrier Reuben is on our side. I’m talking about Selling Sunset. There, I’ve admitted it. It’s a show where a team of beautiful women sell beautiful houses on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and fight like wildcats in the process. But you know what’s nicest about that show? That it makes you realise that the grass is perfectly green right where you are…I am not sure that’s what the producers intended. I love the beautful clothes and I love the beautiful hair and the beautiful girls, but I don’t love the cookie-cutter houses with their crazy price tags, the sun, the emotional turmoil everywhere and the extensive “work” the women have had done.

Liv asked me to do her portrait this weekend but due to all the binge-watching we ran out of time. On Bank Holiday Monday, Liv couldn’t bring herself to catch the earlier train back to Dublin, and we took in yet another episode of Selling Sunset. That was my cue to draw Liv: I love sketching her. I even got Reuben in, although the household activity kept making his eyes snap open and his head turn; each time he was petted back into sleep by Liv until I had him safely on my page.

Some Portraiture Tips

• Liv is a great model, and is good at keeping still. That’s the most important element in making a portrait from life. Movement is very off-putting and you have to make a big effort to be patient, especially when your subject doesn’t think they’ve moved.
• The next most important thing is to draw exactly what you see. That’s easier said than done, but there are ways to get better at that. It’s all about practice. Draw things you don’t know the shape of, like a crumpled t-shirt or chopped-up vegetables. Paint the space around them – the negative space – like the sushi board below. With time, your observation skills will improve a lot.
• Painting your dog? Don’t use a photo. Do make a number of sketches of them. Asleep is good, of course. Tell everyone to be quiet, or else. Demand silence for a few short minutes as dogs are SO jumpy.
• Use a watercolour brush first, with super-dilute paint. You can then wash that away if you’re dramatically wrong, or leave it to fade into the background if it’s dry before you forget to wash it away.
• Use the fine side of your fude pen nib to capture your lines. That way, mistakes won’t be too glaring.
• Try using a gentler colour ink than black. I like brown and dark grey-blue.
• Look hard and honestly. Glasses? You’re not “putting them on the face” of your subject. There’s no point at which face turns into glasses: it’s all an amorphous blob.
• Pretend you’re an alien and you don’t know such thing as glasses exist, or that they’re “put on” a face. All you know is, here there’s a line, here there’s a thing that might be an eyelash, but it’s just a dark shape.
• Draw shapes, not named features. Try not to say to yourself “I’m not getting that eye right” – rather, say “that shape doesn’t match what I see”.
• You don’t need to put paint everywhere. If it’s bathed in light, like a cheekbone, consider leaving it unpainted. This is watercolour, not oil, nor gouache.
• Squint. Look for shapes. Look for darks and lights. Squinting makes darks and lights more obvious, and eliminates distracting detail.

Negative Space

…it’s such a useful concept!

This sketch is a good example of the use of the negative spaces between the sushis to produce the “positive” shapes of the rice under the sushis. (Forgive my clumsy description of the sushi pieces, other than nori rolls I don’t know what they’re called.) If you’ve struggled with the concept of negative spaces, then do a still life of your own: arrange a few things on a nice little chopping board and, rather than painting the things you’ve put on it, “draw” paint the bits of board you can see between them. Once you get the hang of painting the space between what you’re reaally interested in, you’ll feel your observational skill improving…sneaking up on you, if you will.

All work and no play..

…makes your sketching far less fun! So after you’ve put all the hard work in, treat yourself to something foolish and enjoy yourself.

A bunch of sushi with smiley faces or a TV show where the same outfit is never seen twice – I’m not sure which is more frivolous, but they’re both a lot of fun.

(One last thing: two online courses coming up, in May and in June…I will reveal all next time! Hint: one of them might win in the frivolity stakes…)