Drawing portraits

Every week me and my fellow art students have an assignment to make 20 sketches. It could be a sketch of anything; an object, a part of the body, a portrait. I really want to become good at drawing the human face so I started to visit Folkkulturcentrum  where they have live models at several occasions during the week. The models sit for 30 minutes. 

Below is my very first awkward portrait. I remember I was petrified because of the complexity of the task. The little figure in the right top corner is my teacher´s drawing showing me how to construct a face.

Paul. Pencil on paper, 3 x 3 cm
November 2013

My teacher, Farigh Ghaderi, made these sketches of Paul at the same occasion. It´s quite impressive
to be able to make this in just 30 minutes. These sketches resemble the model.

By now I´ve done around one hundred 30 minutes portraits. I experiment with different media and styles. I try to concentrate on the construction of the face and to get the proportions right.

Maj. Pencil and crayon on paper, 15 x 15 cmApril 16, 2014

Painting of the Day: Letter from the Front

Letter from the Front (1947)
by Nikolaj Borisovich Terpsikhorov (1890-1960)
Oil on canvas, 130 x 170 cm

This is a painting that I saw in the Springville Museum of Art in Utah earlier this year (the museum has a large collection of Russian art, a bit unexpectedly I would say.) This painter knows how to build structure with each paintbrush, light and dark colours working together to create volume. Before he applied the paint the artist made a very careful drawing on the canvas. 

As an art student I´m  learning how to see and how to draw.  I spend many hours copying drawings of classical sculptures and it´s supposed to be an exact copy. Here´s my latest attempt:

My copy of Charles Bargue´s drawing of the bust of Agrippa

It´s a very tedious process. I draw some lines and then I realize that my lines doesn't really go the same way as the lines I´m copying. So I erase and start all over. And when I think it´s OK my teacher ask something like this: What is happening here? and then I see that my line is 1/2 millimeter off or that my shape is not really looking like the shape I´m copying, It´s a very tedious process, a very, very slow process. This process teaches me to see.

"When you know the rules, you can break the rules" 

Farigh Ghaderi (my teacher)

Welcome to my art blog!

 I hope you can appreciate the irony of the title of my blog. Of course it will not be a complete guide to becoming an artist but it will guide you through my own struggle in becoming an artist.  I´m an art student and I study art in the classical, academical way.

The pictures above show you how to (according to the Russian tradition) make a drawing, in this case a drawing of a bust.

When I started doing "30 minutes portraits" in November last year I had no clue of how to build up the structure of a portrait. I merely goofed around and produced strange looking aliens. 

Portrait of an Alien, model sitting for 30 minutes

In the coming posts I will show you how my 30 minutes-portraits have evolved.