I love portrait projects. I would not have said this ten years ago. In fact, if you had asked me how I felt about drawing people I would have said, “I can’t draw people!” Over the years, my skill has definitely improved. Lots of practice, trial and error in my sketchbook, and many hours of human figure drawing classes have helped me gain experience and confidence. I’ve also loosened up a bit when it comes to the process of drawing people, and allowing myself to use the tools available to me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I sometimes use various tracing techniques in order to capture a person’s unique likeness — when just a millimeter of extra space between a person’s eyes can completely change their face, it’s super important to get the measurements just right. “Eyeballing it” doesn’t cut it!
I recently had the pleasure of getting commissioned to create a wedding portrait for two of my friends here in Houston. While working on the artwork, I was thinking a lot about the importance of allowing yourself time away from a piece in order to see the work with fresh eyes. The amount of time that goes into a drawing or painting can sometimes be a little misleading — it might take ten hours to draw and paint something, but that’s not the amount of time required for the work. It’s probably more like twenty hours… or more. Since this was a topic on my mind, I thought it might be interesting to record a quick video with some behind-the-scenes insight into the process.
If you watched the video above, let me know what you think. Were you surprised to see how many layers go into one piece of artwork?