Close up! Eyes are my favorite. ?
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Face #24. Can you tell who he’s impersonating?
Eye candy, for sure! (And unusually go for the dark ones, not the Nordic types.) Drawn from a photo.

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Face #23. Who is this impersonating—can you tell? (I’ve decided that I draw portraits of impersonators. ?) My subject was a drawing of a famous person by Christopher Sia.

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Face #22. My goal was to get really loose, but it seems loosening up without copying someone else’s loose drawing may take awhile. We work with what we have, and each endeavor is a step along the way.

As a singing teacher of mine said, each performance is a rehearsal for the next performance.

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Face #21 — 3 solid weeks of daily faces!
With this one, I’m trying to learn to draw more quickly, using someone else’s gesture drawing as inspiration.
My “native” mode is to get really caught up in the details, and much as I enjoy that, I don’t always want to spend the time! I’d like to be able to capture a likeness in fewer strokes.

Mimicking proportions precisely freehand is still beyond me, but the cool thing is that I’m getting better!

Not perfect, but *better*. And as an ex of mine always said, better is better!

The other cool thing is that I’ve drawn enough faces now that I’m starting to actually have a grasp of how light and shadow play on a face. I’m starting to see the common denominators — the shadows alongside the nose, under the lip, under the chin, on the cheek, above and below the eye.

I’m not drawing faces from my head *yet*, but I have a grasp of HOW people can actually do that!

If you do anything enough, you understand HOW to do it.
So now, instead of portrait drawing feeling like an incomprehensible mystery, like magic, I see the HOW behind it, and I have a little grasp of that how.

Dang, that is cool!

And I’d never have gotten here if I hadn’t STARTED! If I hadn’t let myself do it, even though I’m not as good at it as I want to be.

If you want to unsuck at something, you’ve got to let yourself suck for awhile.

I will continue to let myself be an imperfect learner at this. Because you know what? Frustrating as it can be, it’s FUN to learn new things!

Go try something you don’t know how to do well yet. It’s the DOING that will get you there. We get better by DOING, not by dreaming about doing.

#portraitdrawing #portraitsketch #originalart #drawingpractice #gesturedrawing #pencildrawing #faceoftheday #facedrawing #creativesandbox #originalart #artistsoninstagram #artistsofinstagram #abundantartshow #instaartist #instaart #makeart #dailycreative #makestuff #gogetcreating