I got a bit fed up with studying the head and face. So, while working on this portrait and head structure stuff I also took some breaks and played around with ink.
Generally I find looking at people’s eyes difficult which made the head structure stuff quite demanding. It’s probably because of my autism but what I loose in some areas of art I gain in others so I don’t mind. At least I understand what is difficult and why.
As a result I often try to avoid portraits and faces. I can do them from photographs, they just wear me out really quickly. Here’s a link to a full on front facing portrait I managed recently where I just screwed up my courage and went for it. (Mud Man Link). In paintings generally, when I can, I often hide the eyes and if I can’t do that I often have my subjects with their eyes closed or at least not looking at the viewer. e.g.



Faces in real life are a different matter all together. When I sketched some friends last week I found myself avoiding drawing their faces until the end and then putting in simplified features so that I didn’t have to look at their faces for more than a glance. It was so much harder than looking at a photograph that it really shook me. I guess a photograph is really just tone and colour in certain patterns whereas people sitting there are real, whole and alive.
So with the inks I just had some fun…
I did some doodling…
And then a bit more doodling while thinking about this really enormous prime number (2^74 201 281 -1) which was discovered on 4th January 2018!
Finally I drew a tiny little woodlouse from reference. It was bliss.