Character and Personality

This week in class was our final portrait sessions!! Hard to believe we are already passed this section in our semester! I’m excited to move on to different projects, though honestly, I will miss the live studio portraits together as a class. Moving forward I shall have to keep practicing personally outside of class, because I have loooooooved it!!

Class was super helpful this week! I got some very useful pro tips from our professor!

For context of the angle I was working, I had a profile view on the shadow side of my model with a back light and a soft overhead light. Due to that, I was instructed to treat the overhead light as the light source and keeping the back light spotlight as an added rim light at the end, not as a key light source itself. This helped me to focus on creating the facial dimension with more contrast between the light upper planes of the face and the darker lower planes.

When working with my overhead light source, it was explained that the light diffuses as it goes down the face, being brightest at the forehead and getting less bright the further down. This helped to make sure that the lightest parts of the jaw are not as bright as the lightest parts on the forehead. In similar fashion to the gradient of an overhead lit egg. Following that advice, I believe, really helped my portrait come together much more naturally.

It was also pointed out that we, of course, want to have our full range of values and edges, but also to focus on having a full range of textures, considering the variations in clothing, fabric, accessories, skin, hair, etc. so that we can have a good quality final product. This tips really helps bring life to our pieces!

Speaking of bringing life to our pieces, the emphasis for our final session was to focus on moving beyond our attention to accuracy, into closer looks at character and personality! As an artist it is a great skill to accentuate the styles while working to better convey the story behind your work. When we intentionally look to magnify the expression, we can better communicate a persona.

If looking for ways to add character and personality to your artwork it can be helpful to try things like focusing on the shapes of the lights and shadows more than using outlines, to explore expressive methods of blending, to vary between different tools to emphasize different textures, exaggerating some key proportions, and utilizing the use of dynamic backgrounds! Have fun with it!!

During my personal portrait session this week I tried to keep these concepts in mind while working! Our beautiful model got all set up and some of the accessories I was excited to include in the portrait was her headphones, cross necklace, and patterned sweater!

I started off with my simple drawing at first, trying to work on proportions, then as I moved onto the charcoal values, I tried to keep the strokes loose and more expressive, while having fun with the detailed accessories.

I finished off the piece with a dark bold stroked background with a rim light around my model. It was such a fun way to end the process! Another decision I made in my final refinements was to not add as much definition to the hair as I normally have been doing. I wanted to keep it a bit vague with just a few key details, leaving some values rougher and more implied than precise.

Overall, I like how it turned out and I am looking forward to continuing my charcoal portrait journey on my own! It’s been a joy to explore and learn all this through classes, I truly feel so blessed to be an art student! Coming up next: drawing animals!! Let’s goooo!!

I hope you have a wonderful and creative day!

Jesus Bless You Abundantly,

Christina