Day 89: Another Portrait Study

Today I decided to do another portrait study of a woman in an old photo.  This is another personal portrait and not anyone who would be recognizable to anyone else.  Actually she probably wouldn’t be recognizable even if anyone did know her.  This one didn’t quite turn out as well as I would have liked.  It was another difficult angle to capture.

I think it’s good to practice some of these difficult angles though even if it does result in some pretty strange looking portraits.  Actually the fact that it results in weird or bad looking portraits is probably all the more reason to practice it.  I’m starting to get a better idea of what a head looks like from different angles and how to rotate it.  All of those beach balls and robot heads must have been helping even if it didn’t feel like I was making progress on them.  I still struggle with some of these perspective issues though.  It’s also challenging to rotate individual features and still give them form and shape.  I suppose it’s just another one of those things I’ll slowly improve on over time.  Practice, practice practice.

At least I got my sketching done earlier in the day today.  I’m trying for another early night tonight so that’s a step in the right direction.  Changing habits is always hard.  Also, the earlier I do my sketch the more I feel like I should be doing with it.  At the end of the night it feels just a little bit more acceptable to post a bad sketch than it does early in the day.  I think I took this one about as far as I could though without re-doing the whole thing.  I’ll probably give it another shot at some point starting from scratch.  This version was just starting to get overworked though with all of the adjustments I was doing to try to make it look better.