Paper rulers and portraiture

I am a mix of old school and new school.  I can and will use technology to advance my artistic endeavors.

When I start a portrait, I am old school about it.  When working from a photo, I will grid and draw reference points.  It tends to look like an outline - better than a tracing or projection, but still far from a finished drawing.

To assist me, I use image editing software called GIMP.  It is free and powerful enough to do just about anything I need done.  The first thing I like to do is to play around with the cropping tool and get my subject well composed.  Then I will use the color curves tool to adjust the brightness and color levels until I am pleased with the visible details.

Once I am happy with the composition of the image, I will toss on a grid.  (It is a RENDER item on the menus.)

This particular grid is 150x150 pixels and the resulting core grid is 4x4.  I decided that my blocks would be 2 square inches, so my work area would be 8"x8"  - a standard sheet of A4 watercolor paper would work just fine.

I started to draw the grid and quickly discovered that I did not have ruler with me.  I eventually searched for "paper ruler" on Google and found a number of sites that have printable rulers.  I printed mine from PrintARuler.com and put the grid on the page very lightly.  I have to say that a paper ruler does indeed work, but the lack of heft allows it to shift and move way too easily - but it worked wonderfully in a pinch.

After studying the image, I decided to rotate the image and started working on it upside down.  This is one of those artistic jedi-mind tricks that help you pay closer attention to shapes and values while helping you not get caught-up in the mental shorthand or iconistic static that we all have to deal with.

Here is the pencil sketch.  I added a lot of noise to it and really, really darkening some very faint lines so you can see what the sketch looks like:



I will probably open the eyes up a little more, adjust the hair a bit near the center of the head, and make a few other tweaks, but it is solid enough to lay down some gouache.  Problem is, the gouache won't be here until Monday, so I will return to this next week.