• Well, I’m starting to get excited – are you? The Royal Wedding is not far away. Most people seem quite cool about it, but I reckon that will change by the day and everyone will be glued to their sets watching.

    Anyway, I thought it was a good time to do a more realistic portrait drawing lesson. I don’t do this kind of thing everyday, so it is well out of my comfort zone. I applied the same logic as I would do if if I’m drawing a guitar. I forget the face and the person and analyse the geometry and spatial relationships of the face and plot my findings as the framework of the drawing. After that comes the shading, which slowly brings the drawing to life. Hope you like it. If you think it doesn’t look like her, don’t worry, use it as a how to draw a pretty young woman lesson!

    Portraits are very hard to do without the person sitting in front of you. If you don’t know the person it’s even harder. You will often see drawings of famous people and think wow, that looks just like them. But what you are seeing is a straight copy of a photograph you already know well. It’s not a portrait of the person, but a copy of a photograph. Often a portrait will not look like the person you know from the TV, but the people who know that person will know that it is the person, even if it doesn’t quite capture the likeness – it will have an essence of the person. To do that you have to have met and know the object of the portrait.

    I’ll most likely do Prince William, who is a bit easier to draw. Pretty young women, like Kate Middleton, are actually very hard to draw because they don’t have lined faces or cauliflower ears or broken noses, which add character to a face and make it easier to capture the essence of the portrait’s subject. I think I’ll have a whole royal theme this month, so any ideas are welcome.

  • I did some fabulous drawing sessions with the children at Hobletts Infant School on Monday. As I walked in one of the year two classes, I saw they were doing crocodiles and instantly decided to read them the Just So story of how the elephant got it’s trunk – The Elephant’s Child. Then I remembered that it’s really difficult showing how to draw the elephant and that it never comes out as I would hope. But I was committed to the story.

    Then, because they were focussing on the crocodile, I decided to do a different drawing – of the scene where the crocodile grabs the elephant’s trunk. It’s probably a much harder drawing, but far easier to explain, step by step. And it’s far more satisfying – all that violence!

    Here are some of their drawings. Guess which one is mine? (the least enthusiastic one!)

  • I had a great time at Hobletts Infant School this Monday. It was a bit chaotic, as they were having a new library installed, so books were piles up around the Staff Room, being sorted and thinned out. One of the thinning was a club book from the Tufty Club, which must have been lurking untouched on the old library shelves for years!

    I was very impressed by a painting of penguins and puffins on the wall of the dining hall. The school is probably 1950’s, made in a cheap, throw’em up, pre-fab style. It still has it’s original metal, crittal windows, because the whole place would collapse if they were replaced! But there is this fabulous mural – I couldn’t see a signature, because part of it was hidden behind cupboards and things. ( I should be more nosey!) It must have been done very soon after the school was built. It has that wonderful Festival of Britain style about it. I hope it is logged somewhere . It should probably have a preservation order on it. It could do with a bit of restoration!

    Any way, Thanks for a great day everyone. Fabulous drawing – all of you – teachers too!